Azure Load Balancer
Deliver high availability and network performance to your applications.
Overview
Azure Load Balancer allows you to scale your applications and create high availability for your services. It distributes inbound traffic to backend pool instances according to configured load-balancing rules and health probes. Load Balancer can be used for inbound as well as outbound scenarios, and provides low latency and high throughput, scaling up to millions of flows for all TCP and UDP applications. It operates at layer 4 of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model.
✨ Key Features
- Layer 4 (TCP, UDP) load balancing
- High availability and scalability
- Low latency and high throughput
- Health probes to monitor backend instance health
- Port forwarding for specific VMs
- Outbound connection support via SNAT
- Support for both public and internal endpoints
🎯 Key Differentiators
- High performance and low latency
- Integration with Azure availability zones for high availability
- Simple to configure for basic Layer 4 load balancing scenarios
Unique Value: Provides a simple, highly performant, and cost-effective way to distribute network traffic to ensure application scalability and reliability.
🎯 Use Cases (4)
✅ Best For
- Load balancing incoming internet traffic to a pool of web servers
- Creating a highly available tier of application servers inside a virtual network
- Load balancing traffic for a multi-node SQL Server Always On availability group
💡 Check With Vendor
Verify these considerations match your specific requirements:
- Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) load balancing, SSL termination, or URL-based routing (use Azure Application Gateway)
- Global load balancing across regions (use Azure Traffic Manager or Azure Front Door)
🏆 Alternatives
While competitors offer similar services, Azure Load Balancer is tightly integrated into the Azure VNet fabric, making it the natural choice for Layer 4 load balancing within the platform.
💻 Platforms
🔌 Integrations
🛟 Support Options
- ✓ Email Support
- ✓ Live Chat
- ✓ Phone Support
- ✓ Dedicated Support (Professional Direct, Premier tier)
🔒 Compliance & Security
💰 Pricing
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