For a long time, I thought of the load balancer as a performance device. Its job was to distribute traffic, improve uptime, and make applications feel fast. Security was something that happened elsewhere, on firewalls, inside WAFs or deep in the application code. That perspective changed early in my consulting career. I worked with a customer who had invested heavily in security tools like firewalls, endpoint protection and a WAF buried deep in the stack. The technology was solid. The problem wasn’t the tools; it was the architecture. At the edge, the load balancer was treated purely as a performance device, tuned only for speed. Security policies such as strict TLS enforcement, request hygi...