What action does an OCI Load Balancer take when a backend instance fails its health check?

When a backend instance fails its health check, the OCI Load Balancer stops sending traffic to that instance. This is a critical feature of the load balancer, as it ensures that clients do not receive requests from unhealthy instances. By no longer directing traffic to a failed instance, the load balancer maintains higher availability and reliability of applications, leading to a better user experience.

This functionality allows the load balancer to continuously monitor the health of backend instances and dynamically adjust the traffic flow to only include instances that are operational and healthy. Thus, ensuring that only healthy instances are utilized for the traffic, which is fundamental in maintaining service reliability and performance.

Other actions, such as terminating the instance or raising an alert, are not directly managed by the load balancer in response to health check failures. The temporary removal from the backend set is a valid consideration but is more accurately described as a preventive measure that occurs because the load balancer ceases to route traffic to the unhealthy instance rather than explicitly removing it from the backend set configuration.