Abstract: Cloud computing has seen remarkable growth and adoption in recent times based on on-demand resource usage principles. Two critical challenges in the usage of cloud computing are cloud security and performance stability. Towards performance stability, load balancing plays a vital role in cloud computing to enhance throughput, optimize resource use and reduce response time. Important criteria to be considered while selecting a load balancing algorithm for cloud is the ability of the algorithm to address distributed network, dynamic environment and self regulation. With the proliferation of data centers, additional challenge in cloud computing paradigm is having energy efficient load balancing in a dynamic and scalable environment with an undefined number of heterogeneous resources. In this study, we discuss the topic of load balancing and survey the different algorithms that are proposed for distributing the load among the nodes and also the parameters that are taken into account for calculating the optimal algorithm to balance the load.