Reliability and Azure Load Balancer
Load balancing refers to efficiently distributing load (incoming network traffic) across a group of backend resources or servers. With Azure Load Balancer, load-balance traffic to and from virtual machines and cloud resources, and in cross-premises virtual networks.
You can scale your applications and create highly available services with Azure Load Balancer. It supports both inbound and outbound scenarios. Load balancer provides low latency and high throughput.
Key benefits include:
- Load balance internal and external traffic to Azure virtual machines.
- Increase availability by distributing resources within and across zones.
- Configure outbound connectivity for Azure virtual machines.
- Use health probes to monitor load-balanced resources.
For more information, reference Why use Azure Load Balancer?
To understand how Azure Load Balancer supports a reliable workload, reference the following topics:
- Improve application scalability and resiliency by using Azure Load Balancer
- Load Balancer and Availability Zones
- High availability ports overview
Checklist
Have you configured Azure Load Balancer with reliability in mind?
- For production workloads, use the Standard Stock Keeping Units (SKU).
Configuration recommendations
Consider the following recommendation to optimize reliability when configuring an Azure Load Balancer:
| Recommendation | Description |
|---|---|
| For production workloads, use the Standard Stock Keeping Units (SKU). | Basic load balancers don't have a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The Standard SKU supports Availability Zones. |
Tip
For more details on Reliability guidance for Load Balancer, see Reliability in Azure Load Balancer.