Retirement Announcement - Basic Load Balancer will be retired on 30 September 2025

Question

Basic LB will be deprecated on September 30, 2025. Below are timelines to keep in mind for deprecation:

March 31, 2025 - Last day to create new Basic Load Balancer. After this date, you will not be able to create new Basic Load Balancers. Basic Load Balancers created prior to this date will continue to work.

September 30, 2025 - Retirement Day of Basic Load Balancer. After this date, you will not be able to use Basic Load Balancers.

Please note that this retirement will not affect customers that are on Azure Cloud Services (extended support).

Answer 1

We have a Basic load balancer that was deployed as part of Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AADDS). Do we need to upgrade this manually, or do we even need to upgrade this?

On the AADDS page (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory-domain-services/network-considerations), it warns:
"Don't delete or modify any of the network resource created by Azure AD DS, such as manually configuring the load balancer or rules. If you delete or modify any of the network resources, an Azure AD DS service outage may occur."

Answer 2

To migrate to Standard Load Balancer, please follow the instructions here.

If you have any additional questions regarding this retirement, please comment on this thread to ask your specific questions and we will try our best to answer. Thank you!”

Answer 3

Hi,

Currently, in LCS deploying a tier 1 environment creates a basic sku load balancer.

What will be happening to existing ones deployed via LCS? Can they be upgraded as well?

Will LCS in future be updated to deploy standard load balancers and if so what are the dates?

Thanks,

barry

Answer 4

After migrating a load balancer to Standard SKU using the provided power shell script, we ran into issues with internet connectivity of our VMs behind that load balancer. There is no real good documentation about this available, so I filed a bug on the Github space for the LB Migration documentation -> https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/120250 As it turned out, the internet routing has to be recreated manually after using the PowerShell migration script, by deploying a NAT gateway or assigning public IP addresses either. Depending on the resources connected to the VNet subnet, using a NAT gateway might be impossible.