Azure Load Balancer is a service provided by Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing platform of Microsoft. It is a traffic distribution mechanism that helps ensure high availability, scalability, and reliability of applications running in Azure by evenly distributing incoming network traffic among multiple virtual machines (VMs) or other endpoints. The goal of Azure Load Balancer is to prevent any single VM or endpoint from being overwhelmed with incoming requests, thereby optimizing the overall performance and availability of the application.
Key points to help you understand Azure Load Balancer:
1. **Load Balancing Algorithms:** Azure Load Balancer uses various load balancing algorithms to distribute traffic, such as Round Robin, Least Connections, and Source IP Affinity. The chosen algorithm depends on the configuration and requirements of the application.
2. **Public and Internal Load Balancing:** Azure Load Balancer can be used for both public-facing applications and internal applications within a Virtual Network (VNet). Public Load Balancer allows inbound connections from the internet to be distributed across multiple VMs. Internal Load Balancer, on the other hand, handles traffic only within the VNet and does not have a public-facing IP address.
3. **Health Probing:** Azure Load Balancer continuously monitors the health of the VMs or endpoints it is load balancing. It sends health probes to each backend instance and removes unhealthy instances from the load-balanced pool until they become healthy again.
4. **Inbound and Outbound Load Balancing:** Load Balancer can handle incoming traffic to the VMs, but it can also be used to load balance outbound traffic from the VMs to the internet, enabling better performance for scenarios like VMs running behind Network Address Translation (NAT).
5. **Session Affinity:** Azure Load Balancer supports session affinity (also known as sticky sessions) where the same client is directed to the same backend instance for the duration of a session. This ensures that all requests from a specific client are consistently directed to the same backend, maintaining session integrity.
6. **Integration with Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets:** Azure Load Balancer works seamlessly with individual Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS). VMSS allows you to automatically scale the number of VMs based on demand, and Load Balancer ensures that traffic is distributed effectively across all the VMs in the scale set.
7. **Integration with Azure Services:** Azure Load Balancer can also be used with other Azure services, such as Azure Application Gateway, to create more advanced load balancing scenarios for web applications.
Standard vs Basic Azure Load Balancer
Load Balancer plays a crucial role in maintaining the availability and performance of applications hosted in Azure, ensuring that they can handle traffic efficiently and gracefully scale as demand fluctuates.
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