Azure Load Balancer (ALB) is a Layer 4 load balancer that distributes incoming traffic across multiple backend servers. ALB is a critical component for highly available and scalable applications, ensuring that users can access your applications without any downtime or performance degradation.
Benefits of Azure Load Balancer
ALB offers a range of benefits for your Azure applications:
- High Availability: ALB distributes traffic across multiple backend servers, ensuring that your applications remain available even if one or more servers fail.
- Scalability: ALB can automatically scale the number of backend servers up or down based on demand, ensuring that your applications can handle spikes in traffic.
- Improved Performance: ALB distributes traffic evenly across backend servers, optimizing performance and response times for your users.
- Health Monitoring: ALB continuously monitors the health of backend servers, automatically removing unhealthy servers from the load-balancing pool.
- Traffic Management: ALB provides various traffic management features, such as traffic routing, geo-fencing, and connection timeouts.
Combining ALB with Availability Zones
To achieve the highest level of application resiliency, combine ALB with Azure Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically isolated locations within an Azure region. By deploying your backend servers across multiple Availability Zones and using ALB to distribute traffic across them, you can protect your applications from regional outages.
Integration with Standard Tier VMs
ALB is included with Standard tier virtual machines. This makes it easy to enable load balancing for your existing VMs without incurring additional costs.
Global Load Balancing with Non-HTTPS Traffic
ALB supports global load balancing with non-HTTPS traffic, allowing you to distribute traffic across multiple Azure regions. This is particularly useful for applications that have a global audience.
Support for up to 1000 Backend VMs
ALB can handle a massive scale, supporting up to 1000 backend VMs. This makes it suitable for even the most demanding applications.
In Conclusion
Azure Load Balancer is an essential tool for ensuring the availability, scalability, and performance of your Azure applications. By leveraging ALB, you can provide a seamless and responsive user experience, even under heavy traffic loads and during unexpected events.
