Hardware implemented load balancing

A server system is provided that includes a plurality of servers, each server including at least one hardware acceleration device and at least one processor communicatively coupled to the hardware acceleration device by an internal data bus and executing a host server instance, the host server instances of the plurality of servers collectively providing a software plane, and the hardware acceleration devices of the plurality of servers collectively providing a hardware acceleration plane that implements a plurality of hardware accelerated services, wherein each hardware acceleration device maintains in memory a data structure that contains load data indicating a load of each of a plurality of target hardware acceleration devices, and wherein a requesting hardware acceleration device routes the request to a target hardware acceleration device that is indicated by the load data in the data structure to have a lower load than other of the target hardware acceleration devices.