Hello DigitalOcean Community, We are running a real-time ride-hailing platform — and are currently exploring the best options for implementing a highly available and scalable load balancer setup. Given the nature of our platform, where driver and rider locations are updated constantly and requests must be processed with low latency, we need a solution that: Supports real-time traffic handling Offers auto-scaling or handles rapid traffic spikes Ensures high availability Works well with containerized applications (our backend uses Docker) We are currently hosted on DigitalOcean and are looking at options like: DigitalOcean Load Balancer HAProxy NGINX with failover support Kubernetes with Ingress + LoadBalancer service 👉 What would be the most reliable and cost-effective load balancing setup for a platform like ours? Any practical insights, example configurations, or performance tips would be very helpful. Thank you in advance!

DigitalOcean

- Community
- DigitalOcean
- Community
- DigitalOcean

Question

What is the recommended load balancer setup for a real-time ride platform?

Posted on June 21, 2025

DigitalOcean Managed Load Balancers

By josaf bodia

Hello DigitalOcean Community,

We are running a real-time ride-hailing platform — and are currently exploring the best options for implementing a highly available and scalable load balancer setup.

Given the nature of our platform, where driver and rider locations are updated constantly and requests must be processed with low latency, we need a solution that:

Supports real-time traffic handling
Offers auto-scaling or handles rapid traffic spikes
Ensures high availability
Works well with containerized applications (our backend uses Docker)

We are currently hosted on DigitalOcean and are looking at options like:

DigitalOcean Load Balancer
HAProxy
NGINX with failover support
Kubernetes with Ingress + LoadBalancer service

👉 What would be the most reliable and cost-effective load balancing setup for a platform like ours?

Any practical insights, example configurations, or performance tips would be very helpful.

Thank you in advance!

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Bobby Iliev

June 22, 2025

Hey!

For a real-time ride-hailing platform like yours, you’ll definitely want something that can handle rapid traffic spikes, stay highly available, and play nice with Dockerized apps.

If you’re already on DigitalOcean, here’s what I’d go with:

DigitalOcean Load Balancer: it’s managed, supports sticky sessions, auto-scales traffic behind the scenes, and works out of the box with Droplets and Kubernetes. 👉 https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/networking/load-balancers/

If you’re using containers, DigitalOcean Kubernetes with an Ingress controller + LoadBalancer is a really solid setup. It gives you more control and scales better long-term. 👉 https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/how-to/configure-load-balancers/

HAProxy and NGINX can work too if you want full control, but you’d have to manage them yourself, I’d only go that route if you need custom routing logic or are running outside of K8s.

If you’re containerized, go with DO Kubernetes + Ingress + LoadBalancer. If you’re keeping it simpler with just Droplets, their managed Load Balancer does the job well.

Hope that helps!

- Bobby