Az 104 —Azure Load Balancer
By: Setumo Raphela
Tags: Microsoft, Azure Load Balancer, Az104, Cloud Computing, Azure

· Azure Load Balancer is a service you can use to distribute traffic across multiple virtual machines.

· Use Load Balancer to scale applications and create high availability for your virtual machines and services.

· Load balancers use a hash-based distribution algorithm.

· By default, a five-tuple hash is used to map traffic to available servers.

· The hash is made from the following elements:

o Source IP: The IP address of the requesting client.

o Source port: The port of the requesting client.

o Destination IP: The destination IP of the request.

o Destination port: The destination port of the request.

o Protocol type: The specified protocol type, TCP or UDP.

· Two products are available when you create a load balancer in Azure:

o Basic Load Balancers.

o Standard Load Balancer.

· Basic load balancers allow:

o Port forwarding

o Automatic reconfiguration

o Health probes

o Outbound connections through source network address translation (SNAT)

o Diagnostics through Azure Log Analytics for public-facing load balancers

· Basic load balancers can be used only with availability sets.

· Standard load balancers support all of the basic features.

· They also allow:

HTTPS health probes

Availability zones

Diagnostics through Azure Monitor, for multidimensional metrics

High Availability (HA) ports

Outbound rules

A guaranteed SLA (99.99% for two or more virtual machines)

· Load Balancer uses a health probe to determine the availability of each VM that’s referenced by addresses in the back-end pool.

· Load Balancer only sends requests to VMs that indicate they’re healthy.

· Load Balancer selects the IP address of a VM from the back-end pool by using an algorithm designed to distribute requests evenly.

· You can start additional VM instances and add their IP addresses to the back-end pool at any time.

· Load Balancer includes these new instances when it distributes user requests.

· Load Balancer can expose more than one public front-end IP address, and might have multiple back-end pools.

· This scheme enables you to reuse the same instance of Load Balancer to handle requests for different systems.

· Load Balancer needs to determine whether each VM referenced by the back-end pool is available for handling requests.

· You add a health probe to do this.

· A health probe sends regular ping messages to a port that you specify for the VMs in the back-end pool.

· You provide a service on the VMs that responds to these ping messages, with an HTTP 200 (OK) message.

· When the VM fails to respond after a specified number of attempts, Load Balancer assumes it’s unhealthy and removes it from the list of VMs that can accept user requests.

· The workload is then distributed among the remaining healthy VMs.

· Load Balancer continues to ping an unresponsive VM.

· If the VM starts to reply, it’s added back into the list of healthy VMs and starts receiving user requests again.

· You can visualize metrics for Load Balancer by using the Metrics page in the Azure portal.

· From a connectivity troubleshooting perspective, the most important metrics are Data Path Availability and Health Probe Status.

· Azure Load Balancer is limited to only load balancing and handling port-forwarding for the TCP and UDP protocols.

· You can’t use Load Balancer to manage requests submitted by using other network protocols such as ICMP.