

In the Search resources, services, and docs box at the top of the portal, type load balancing. Azure Load Balancing includes the decision making queries described in the workflow of the following section and can be accessed as follows: You can use the Azure Load Balancing page in the Azure portal to help you guide to the right load-balancing solution for your business need. Choose a load balancing solution using Azure portal Azure Load Balancer is zone-redundant, ensuring high availability across Availability Zones. It is built to handle millions of requests per second while ensuring your solution is highly available. Use it to optimize web farm productivity by offloading CPU-intensive SSL termination to the gateway.Īzure Load Balancer is a high-performance, ultra low-latency Layer 4 load-balancing service (inbound and outbound) for all UDP and TCP protocols. For that reason, it can't fail over as quickly as Front Door, because of common challenges around DNS caching and systems not honoring DNS TTLs.Īpplication Gateway provides application delivery controller (ADC) as a service, offering various Layer 7 load-balancing capabilities. Because Traffic Manager is a DNS-based load-balancing service, it load balances only at the domain level. Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables you to distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions, while providing high availability and responsiveness. to improve performance and high-availability of your applications.Īt this time, Azure Front Door does not support Web Sockets. It offers Layer 7 capabilities for your application like SSL offload, path-based routing, fast failover, caching, etc. Here are the main load-balancing services currently available in Azure:įront Door is an application delivery network that provides global load balancing and site acceleration service for web applications. The following table summarizes the Azure load balancing services by these categories: Service Non-HTTP/S load-balancing services can handle non-HTTP(S) traffic and are recommended for non-web workloads. They include features such as SSL offload, web application firewall, path-based load balancing, and session affinity. They are intended for web applications or other HTTP(S) endpoints. HTTP(S) load-balancing services are Layer 7 load balancers that only accept HTTP(S) traffic. You can think of them as systems that load balance between VMs, containers, or clusters within a region in a virtual network. Regional load-balancing services distribute traffic within virtual networks across virtual machines (VMs) or zonal and zone-redundant service endpoints within a region. You can think of them as systems that load balance between application stamps, endpoints, or scale-units hosted across different regions/geographies. They also react to changes in service reliability or performance, in order to maximize availability and performance. These services route end-user traffic to the closest available backend. Global load-balancing services distribute traffic across regional backends, clouds, or hybrid on-premises services. Service categorizationsĪzure load balancing services can be categorized along two dimensions: global versus regional, and HTTP(S) versus non-HTTP(S). This article describes how you can use the Azure Load Balancing hub page in the Azure portal to determine an appropriate load-balancing solution for your business needs. It can also improve availability by sharing a workload across redundant computing resources.Īzure provides various load balancing services that you can use to distribute your workloads across multiple computing resources - Application Gateway, Front Door, Load Balancer, and Traffic Manager. Load balancing aims to optimize resource use, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overloading any single resource. The term load balancing refers to the distribution of workloads across multiple computing resources.
