Azure Network Load Balancers

Azure offers load balancers in both the basic and standard SKU. When we discuss the load balancer in this section, we are referring to the Layer 4 TCP and UDP load distribution service instead of the Application Gateway Load Balancer (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/application-gateway/), which is a layer-7 load-balancing solution.

The typical deployment model is usually a one- or two-layer load distribution for an inbound connection from the internet:

Figure 34: Azure Load Balancer (source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/load-balancer/load-balancer-overview)

The load balancer hashes the incoming connection on a 5-tuple hash (source and destination IP, source and destination port, and protocol) and distributes the flow to one or more destinations. The Standard Load Balancer SKU is a superset of the basic SKU, therefore new designs should adopt the Standard Load Balancer.

As with AWS, Azure is constantly innovating with new network...