While user datagram protocol (UDP) is connectionless, the load balancer maintains UDP flow state based on 5-tuple hash, ensuring that packets sent in the same context are consistently forwarded to the same target. The flow is considered active as long as traffic is flowing and until the idle timeout is reached. Once the timeout threshold is reached, the load balancer will forget the affinity, and the incoming UDP packet will be considered a new flow and load-balanced to a new target.