Determine Azure Load Balancer uses

  • 8 minutes

Azure Load Balancer delivers high availability and network performance to your applications. Administrators use load balancing to efficiently distribute incoming network traffic across back-end servers and resources. A load balancer is implemented by using load-balancing rules and health probes.

The following diagram shows how Azure Load Balancer works. The frontend exchanges information with a load balancer. The load balancer uses rules and health probes to communicate with the backend.

Diagram that shows how a load balancer works as described in the text.

Things to know about Azure Load Balancer

Let's take a closer look at how Azure Load Balancer operates.

  • Azure Load Balancer can be used for inbound and outbound scenarios.

  • You can implement a public or internal load balancer, or use both types in a combination configuration.

  • To implement a load balancer, you configure four components:

    • Front-end IP configuration
    • Back-end pools
    • Health probes
    • Load-balancing rules

  • The front-end configuration specifies the public IP or internal IP that your load balancer responds to.

  • The back-end pools are your services and resources, including Azure Virtual Machines or instances in Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

  • Load-balancing rules determine how traffic is distributed to back-end resources.

  • Health probes ensure the resources in the backend are healthy.

  • Load Balancer scales up to millions of TCP and UDP application flows.