English Lesson — Wednesday Morning: Load Balancing & Service Discovery Vocabulary

Word of the Day: distribute

IPA: /dɪˈstrɪbjuːt/ — stress on the second syllable: dis-TRIB-ute.
Vietnamese: phân phối, phân tán (chia đều một thứ gì đó ra nhiều nơi).

• The load balancer will distribute incoming requests across all healthy backend instances.
• We distribute read traffic to replicas and keep writes on the primary node.
• Kubernetes distributes pods across nodes based on available resources.

Listen and check your pronunciation: Cambridge Dictionary — distribute | YouGlish — distribute in real videos

Vocabulary Table

Pronunciation Guide

Break distribute into three beats: dis / TRIB / ute. The middle syllable carries the stress — say it louder and slightly longer than the other two. The “di” sounds like “dih”, not “dye”.

Practice sentence — read it aloud 3 times:

We distribute traffic across three regions so no single data center becomes a bottleneck.

Exercise 1: Fill in the Blank

Fill each blank with one phrase from the vocabulary table above.

1. Before we added a _______, one busy server crashed while the others sat idle.
2. Our new services use _______ instead of a hardcoded list of IP addresses.
3. The simplest way to spread requests evenly is a _______ strategy.
4. If an instance fails its _______, the balancer stops sending it traffic.
5. We chose _______ over buying a bigger server, since it is cheaper to add more small machines.

Exercise 2: Translate

Translate each sentence into the other language.

1. Hệ thống tự động phân phối lưu lượng đến các máy chủ còn hoạt động.
2. The orchestrator checks the health of every instance every ten seconds.
3. Chúng tôi mở rộng theo chiều ngang để xử lý lượng người dùng tăng gấp đôi vào Black Friday.

Idiom of the Day: “spread too thin”

Vietnamese: trải quá mỏng, dàn trải quá mức — làm quá nhiều việc hoặc phục vụ quá nhiều nơi cùng lúc nên không việc nào được làm tốt.

• If one engineer owns five services, the team is spread too thin.
• Don’t spread your servers too thin — add capacity before the next traffic spike.

Recommended Watching

• ByteByteGo — short, visual system-design explainers, including load balancing and service discovery.
• Gaurav Sen — deeper system-design walkthroughs with real interview-style problems.
• Hussein Nasser — backend engineering and networking, good for hearing architecture vocabulary used naturally.

Daily Challenge

Say or write three sentences describing how your current project distributes traffic or discovers services. Use at least two of today’s vocabulary words out loud.