Understanding Azure Load Balancer
Azure Load Balancer is a high-performance, highly available network load balancer that distributes inbound and outbound traffic among multiple virtual machines or services. It operates at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) of the OSI model and supports both public and internal load balancing scenarios.
Key Features:
- High Availability: Built-in redundancy ensures that your applications remain available even during hardware or software failures.
- Scalability: Dynamically scales to handle varying traffic loads, ensuring optimal performance.
- Standard SKU: Offers advanced features like outbound rules, network security groups (NSGs) integration, and zone redundancy.
- Basic SKU: A cost-effective option for simpler load balancing needs.
- Health Probes: Continuously monitors the health of backend instances and routes traffic only to healthy ones.
- Port Forwarding: Allows external access to specific services running on internal VMs.
- Fast Failover: Rapidly detects and reroutes traffic from unhealthy instances.
Common Use Cases:
- Distributing traffic across multiple web servers for a public website.
- Providing internal load balancing for applications deployed within a virtual network.
- Ensuring high availability for critical business applications.
- Enabling seamless scaling of application tiers.
