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Introduction to Azure Load Balancer | AZ-104 | Episode 13

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Load Balancer Overview

  1. Azure Load Balancer helps provide high availability, fault tolerance, and performance scaling so workloads are not dependent on a single service instance.
  2. The lesson focuses on traditional Azure Load Balancer, including types, SKUs, and a demonstration.

Azure Load Balancing Options

  1. Azure offers multiple load balancing services, including traditional Load Balancer, Application Gateway, Front Door, and Traffic Manager.
  2. Azure Load Balancer is a regional layer 4 service, while Application Gateway is a regional layer 7 service with additional application-level features.
  3. Front Door and Traffic Manager are global routing services used to direct users to the closest or most available regional resource.

Public vs Internal Load Balancer

  1. Traditional Azure Load Balancer can be public or internal; the core load balancing behavior is effectively the same in both cases.
  2. A public load balancer uses a public front-end IP address, while an internal load balancer uses a private front-end address inside a virtual network.
  3. For public exposure, the presenter recommends considering a firewall in front of the load balancer to filter unwanted traffic.
  4. Both public and internal load balancers use a front end, a back-end pool, health checks, routing rules, and traffic distribution logic.

Back-End Pools and Scaling

  1. A back-end pool can contain resources such as virtual machine scale sets, allowing capacity to expand or contract based on demand.
  2. Load balancers support high availability by detecting unhealthy back-end nodes and shifting traffic to healthy ones.
  3. Health probes or heartbeat checks determine how often back-end resources are checked and when they should be removed from rotation.

SKU and Rule Configuration

  1. The Azure portal now presents simplified choices such as standard or gateway load balancer and public or internal configuration.
  2. Load balancing rules define how incoming traffic is processed and sent from the front end to the back-end pool.
  3. Azure Load Balancer can use a five-tuple hash based on source IP, source port, destination IP, destination port, and protocol to distribute traffic.
  4. Session persistence and rule configuration can influence how traffic is routed through the load balancer.

Marketplace and Demo

  1. Azure Marketplace includes third-party load balancer appliances from major providers, useful for organizations with existing licensing and management tools.
  2. The demo shows creating an Azure Load Balancer from the portal, choosing a resource group, SKU, public or internal type, front-end IP configuration, and back-end pool.
  3. For an internal load balancer, the demo attaches the front end to a virtual network and subnet instead of assigning a public IP address.
  4. After creation, the load balancer appears as a connected device in the selected subnet with a private IP address.

Recommendation and Summary

  1. The presenter recommends Azure Load Balancer because it is cloud native, dynamically scales with demand, and charges based on usage.
  2. Third-party load balancers may fit existing operational models but can have appliance-style sizing constraints such as ports, memory, and throughput.
  3. The session concludes that Azure Load Balancer comes in public and internal forms, uses similar back-end configurations, and relies on rules and health checks for traffic distribution.

Actiepunten

  1. Watch other videos in the course or explore more on Microsoft Learn at aka.ms.com.