---
title: Directors
summary: null
url: https://www.fastly.com/documentation/reference/api/load-balancing/directors
---

Versioned directors configure load balancing as part of a VCL service configuration.

Use a director to create load balancing groups within your service configuration.

- [Director](https://www.fastly.com/documentation/reference/api/load-balancing/directors/director/) - A Director is responsible for balancing requests among a group of Backends. In addition to simply balancing, Directors can be configured to attempt retrying failed requests. Additionally, Directors have a quorum setting which can be used to determine when the Director as a whole is considered "up", in order to prevent "server whack-a-mole" following an outage as servers come back up. Only directors created via the API can be modified via the API. Directors known as "autodirectors" that are created automatically when load balancing groups of servers together cannot be modified or retrieved via the API.
- [Director backend](https://www.fastly.com/documentation/reference/api/load-balancing/directors/backend/) - Maps and relates backends as belonging to directors. Backends can belong to any number of directors but directors can only hold one reference to a specific backend.