Load Balancing

Load Balancing Options

• Azure Load Balancer

• Traffic Manager

• Azure Application Gateway

• Azure Front Door

Global versus regional

• Global load-balancing services distribute traffic across regional backends, clouds, or hybrid on-premises services. These services route end-user traffic to the closest available backend. Systems that load balance between application stamps, endpoints, or scale-units hosted across different regions/geographies.

• Regional load-balancing services distribute traffic within virtual networks across virtual machines (VMs) or zonal and zone-redundant service endpoints within a region. Systems that load balance between VMs, containers, or clusters within a region in a virtual network.

HTTP(s) versus non-HTTP(s)

• HTTP(S) load-balancing services are Layer 7 load balancers that only accept HTTP(S) traffic. They are intended for web applications or other HTTP(S) endpoints. They include features such as SSL offload, web application firewall, path-based load balancing, and session affinity.

• Non-HTTP(S) load-balancing services can handle non-HTTP(S) traffic and are recommended for non-web workloads.

Service	Global/regional	Recommended Traffic
Azure Front Door	Global	HTTP(s)
Traffic Manager	Global	non-HTTP(s)
Application Gateway	Regional	HTTP(s)
Azure Load Balancer	Regional	non-HTTP(s)

Choosing Load Balancing Option

Choosing Load Balancing Option

Reference

• Load Balance non-HTTP(s) traffic in Azure: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/load-balancing-non-https-traffic-azure/1-introduction