Azure Load Balancers

Azure Load Balancers are highly available and scalable network traffic distribution solutions that help balance and manage incoming web traffic to your applications and services. It ensures that your applications are highly available, and it can manage the distribution of workloads across different virtual machines.

Steps or Explanation

1. Create a load balancer - Start by creating a load balancer in the Azure portal. This step includes creating backend pools and defining health probes to ensure that the load balancer directs traffic only to healthy instances of your application.
2. Configure inbound NAT rules - This step configures inbound NAT rules to allow external traffic to access the virtual machines behind the load balancer.
3. Configure load balancing rules - This step defines the rules that determine how the load balancer routes traffic to backend virtual machines.
4. Monitoring - Azure provides several monitoring features to enable you to monitor the performance and availability of your load balancer.

Examples and Use Cases

• Load balancing HTTP and HTTPS traffic to web servers - In this scenario, Azure Load Balancers are used to distribute web traffic to web servers running in virtual machines.
• Load balancing SQL traffic - In this scenario, Azure Load Balancers are used to distribute SQL traffic to SQL servers running in virtual machines.
• Load balancing TCP traffic - In this scenario, Azure Load Balancers are used to distribute any TCP traffic to backend services running in virtual machines.

Important Points

• Azure Load Balancers support IPv6 traffic as well as IPv4 traffic.
• Azure Load Balancers also support backend health probes, which determine which virtual machines are available to serve traffic.
• Azure Load Balancers can support multiple IP addresses per virtual machine.

Summary

Azure Load Balancers are an essential component in creating highly available and scalable applications on Azure. By distributing incoming traffic to virtual machines, they provide greater redundancy, help eliminate single points of failure, and increase reliability. Furthermore, they offer several monitoring features to enable you to monitor performance and availability.