Load Balancer
Deliver high availability and network performance to your apps, and secure your web front ends with the same service.
Enhance app availability and scale with distributed network traffic
Get high availability and robust performance
Provide a better customer experience by sharing traffic across your servers with nine distribution methods, including least connections, round robin, consistent hash and fastest response.
Use an internal load balancer
Manage traffic between virtual machines inside your private networks with a virtual service on an internal IP, or use it to build multi-tier applications between app and database tiers.
Build reliable apps with health checks
Probe the health of your application servers with HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP and PING monitors. The load balancer automatically takes unhealthy servers out of rotation and reinstates them when they become healthy again.
Expand your reach using IPv6
Publish virtual services over IPv4, IPv6 or dual stack; the same IP address can serve several services on different ports.
Example scenarios
An online shop getting ready for a sales week
Traffic is shared between the web servers with the least-connections method. A server that fails its health check is taken out and comes back by itself once it recovers.
An organisation shielding its web app from attacks
The web application firewall checks requests against common web vulnerabilities. Signature groups that raise false positives are switched off one by one, or exceptions are set for given paths.
A team separating its app and database tiers
A virtual service on an internal IP address spreads traffic from the app servers to the database tier. LoadBalancer services opened in Kubernetes get their counterpart on the load balancer too.
Secure, scale and optimise your web applications
Web application firewall
Protect your applications from common web vulnerabilities. Reduce false positives by switching signature groups on and off and by adding exceptions by path, IP address, method or host.
End-to-end TLS
Connect to pool servers over encryption too, with the server certificate validated against the root certificate authority and by name.
Efficient TLS termination and certificate management
Terminate TLS at the load balancer to reduce encryption overhead on your servers, and pick certificates from your organisation's certificate library.
Layer 7 intelligent routing
Match requests by client IP, method, URL path, query string, header or cookie to redirect them and rewrite headers.
Load balancing for Kubernetes workloads
Opening a Service of type LoadBalancer in Kubernetes creates its counterpart on the load balancer. An annotation chooses whether TLS terminates in the cluster or at the load balancer.
Session persistence
Keep users on the same server with persistence by client IP, HTTP cookie, custom HTTP header, application cookie or TLS.
Embedded security
Traffic passes the gateway firewall
Traffic to a virtual service passes through the gateway firewall; only the ports you write rules for are open.
HTTP security rules
Allow or deny requests, close connections, redirect HTTP to HTTPS and apply rate limits.
Request logs
Filter virtual service logs in the portal by time range, client IP, URI and response, and export them as CSV.
Load Balancer pricing
The load balancer is enabled on your gateway with the full feature set, including WAF, multiple ports and HTTP logs, with no separate licensing step on your side. Contact us for pricing.
Learn more to get started
Software-Defined Networking
See the network model that the load balancer, firewall and internal network rules run on.
Kubernetes
Learn how containerised applications are exposed and keep running under heavy traffic.
Managed Support
See how routine operation of load balancer and network settings can be handed over.