# Is an external load balancer necessary, or does Ignition itself provide load balancing?

**URL:** <https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/is-an-external-load-balancer-necessary-or-does-ignition-itself-provide-load-balancing/113407>\
**Category:** General Discussion\
**Tags:** database, ignition81, perspective\
**Created:** [January 20, 2026, 1:01pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/is-an-external-load-balancer-necessary-or-does-ignition-itself-provide-load-balancing/113407 "2026-01-20T13:01:14Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![saravanakumar.m](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cc9497/32.png) [@saravanakumar.m](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/saravanakumar.m)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2026, 1:01pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/is-an-external-load-balancer-necessary-or-does-ignition-itself-provide-load-balancing/113407/1 "2026-01-20T13:01:14Z")

</div>

In the **MQTT**  **Set** configuration, there is an option to define both **Primary** and **Secondary** servers within a single set. My understanding is that if the Primary server fails, Ignition should automatically switch over to the Secondary server. In this case, is an external load balancer required or not?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dkhayes117](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/dkhayes117/32/68344_2.png) [@dkhayes117](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/dkhayes117)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2026, 3:45pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/is-an-external-load-balancer-necessary-or-does-ignition-itself-provide-load-balancing/113407/2 "2026-01-20T15:45:08Z")

</div>

Seeing as it's a failover, I would say a load balancer is not needed. A load balancer is to direct incoming traffic to multiple servers to distribute processing load.

The failover is all or nothing since only one server is doing the work at any given time, no balancing needed.