The differences between public and internal load balancers
At the very beginning of this chapter, we mentioned that you can assign both private and public IP addresses to your instance of Azure Load Balancer. Depending on your configuration, we may talk about one of two types of load balancer:
- A public load balancer, which is used to provide outbound connections for VMs that don’t have public IP addresses themselves.
- An internal (or private) load balancer (ILB), which is used to handle load balancing within a virtual network. This is helpful in hybrid infrastructure scenarios where on-premises infrastructure is involved as well.
Important note
An ILB can also be used in cloud-only scenarios, so there’s no need to have an on-premises setup integrated with your cloud environment.
Both types of load balancers can coexist, as shown in the following diagram:
Figure 4.1 – Two types of load balancers in the same network...
