Hardware load balancers are dedicated physical appliances built for high-throughput traffic distribution. F BIG-IP and Citrix ADC are common examples.
Advantages:
- Specialized chips handle millions of connections
- Vendor support and warranties
- Often include DDoS protection and WAF features
Disadvantages:
- Expensive: to per device
- Fixed capacity: Need new hardware to scale
- Vendor lock-in: Proprietary configurations
Hardware balancers dominated before cloud computing. They're still common in on-premises data centers with predictable, high traffic loads.