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Reliability and Azure Load Balancer

  • Article

Load balancing refers to efficiently distributing load (incoming network traffic) across a group of backend resources or servers. With Azure Load Balancer, load-balance traffic to and from virtual machines and cloud resources, and in cross-premises virtual networks.

You can scale your applications and create highly available services with Azure Load Balancer. It supports both inbound and outbound scenarios. Load balancer provides low latency and high throughput.

Key benefits include:

  • Load balance internal and external traffic to Azure virtual machines.
  • Increase availability by distributing resources within and across zones.
  • Configure outbound connectivity for Azure virtual machines.
  • Use health probes to monitor load-balanced resources.

For more information, reference Why use Azure Load Balancer?

To understand how Azure Load Balancer supports a reliable workload, reference the following topics:

Checklist

Have you configured Azure Load Balancer with reliability in mind?

  • For production workloads, use the Standard Stock Keeping Units (SKU).

Configuration recommendations

Consider the following recommendation to optimize reliability when configuring an Azure Load Balancer:

Recommendation Description
For production workloads, use the Standard Stock Keeping Units (SKU). Basic load balancers don't have a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The Standard SKU supports Availability Zones.

Tip

For more details on Reliability guidance for Load Balancer, see Reliability in Azure Load Balancer.

Next step

Operational excellence and Azure Load Balancer