The image depicts an external load balancer (HAProxy) routing requests to a swarm service through the routing mesh. The load balancer connects to the published port (e.g., 8080) on each node in the swarm, which then redirects the traffic to the actual service instances. Importantly, port 8080 needs to be open between the load balancer and the swarm nodes, which can reside on a private network accessible to the load balancer.