Load balancers are used to support scaling and high availability for applications and services. A load balancer is primarily composed of two components—a frontend and a backend. Requests coming to the frontend of a load balancer are distributed to the backend, where we place multiple instances of a service. This can be used for performance-related reasons, where we would like to distribute traffic equally between endpoints in the backend, or for high availability, where multiple instances of services are used to increase the chance that at least one endpoint will be available at all times.
We will cover the following recipes in this chapter:
- Creating an internal load balancer
- Creating a public load balancer
- Creating a backend pool
- Creating health probes
- Creating load balancer rules
- Creating inbound NAT rules
