Six of Pentacles

"The Load Balancer"

Pentacles · Infrastructure

Upright +1

Traffic is being distributed evenly across healthy instances by a load balancer that someone configured correctly. Sticky sessions where they matter, health checks that actually check health, and graceful draining on deploys. The Six of Pentacles is infrastructure generosity — resources going where they are needed.

Reversed -1

One instance is handling 90% of the traffic because the load balancer is routing by cookie hash and one whale customer's session is pinned to a single pod. The Six of Pentacles reversed is resources hoarded by accident — the autoscaler that cannot save you from your own routing rules.