Application Discovery and Load Balancer

Question

So I've been looking into the Application Discovery and Load Balancer SharePoint provides now I always though it was just a basic load balancer that can round-robin requests to web service applications but I read something on TechNet that states The Application Discovery and Load Balancer service provides information about the topology of the farm to users who are using services offered by the farm. Users can use this information to perform load balancing. The Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service should be running on at least one server in the farm. Can anyone give me a clear definition?

Answer 1

There are two things Topology service(AKA Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service) is doing in the SharePoint farm.

• In a cross farm service scenario, where you configure the Service application in one farm( called Publishing farm) and consume it different farm( called consumer farm).In this scenario, load balancer use the topology service to communicate to remote server.
• Other thing which you mentioned, it provides end point information of service application to load balancer. if you configure the search service application on 2 server then this service hold the information of 2 physical endpoint(one for each server).

Please read these: SharePoint Web Service Applications

and https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dtaylor/2011/02/23/sharepoint-2010-service-application-load-balancer/