Load balancing is a technique used in computer networks to distribute workloads across multiple servers or resources. This ensures that no single server becomes overwhelmed, which can lead to slow performance or downtime. By evenly distributing requests, load balancing helps maintain high availability and reliability of applications and services. There are various methods of load balancing, including round-robin, least connections, and IP hash. Load balancers can be hardware devices or software applications, and they play a crucial role in optimizing resource use, maximizing throughput, and minimizing response time for users accessing services like websites or cloud applications.