Understanding load balancing options

Many PaaS options in Azure, such as Web Apps and Functions, automatically scale as demand increases (and within limits you set). For this to function, Azure places services such as these behind a load balancer in order to distribute loads between them and redirect traffic from unhealthy nodes to healthy ones.

There are times when either a load balancer is not included, such as with VMs, or when you want to provide additional functionality not provided by the standard load balancers, such as the ability to balance between regions. In these cases, we have the option to build and configure our own load balancers. There are a number of options you can choose from, each providing their own individual capabilities depending on your requirements.

Tip

Although we have stated that VMs require a load balancer if you wish to distribute loads between one or more VMs, when you create a VM scale set, Azure creates and manages a load balancer for you...