Load balancing is an approach to distributing work units across multiple servers in a distributed system. The load balancer acts as a reverse proxy to distribute network or application traffic evenly among servers. It allocates the first task to the first server, second task to the second server, and so on, to balance loads. Load balancing provides security, protects applications from threats using a web application firewall, authenticates user access, protects against DDoS attacks, and improves performance by reducing load on servers and optimizing traffic.