Azure Load Balancer is a load balancer that operates at the transport layer (Layer 4 in the OSI network reference stack). Azure Load Balancer supports the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and it can be used to load-balance traffic to your VMs. It provides high throughput and low latency, it can scale up to millions of flows, and it supports various inbound and outbound scenarios.
Azure Load Balancer can be used for the following:
- Public Load Balancer: Incoming internet traffic is load balanced to VMs.
- Internal Load Balancer: Traffic can be load balanced across VMs inside a virtual network. You can use it in a hybrid scenario as well, where it reaches a Load Balancer inside an on-premises network.
- Port forwarding: You can forward traffic to specific ports on specific VMs using inbound Network Address Translation (NAT) rules...