Chapter 8. Load-balancing applications
An important component of highly available applications is how to distribute traffic across all your VMs. In the previous chapter, you learned the difference between availability sets and availability zones, and how you can create multiple VMs across Azure datacenters or regions to provide application redundancy. Even if you have all these highly available and distributed VMs, that doesn’t help if only one VM receives all the customer traffic.
Load balancers are network resources that receive the incoming application traffic from your customers, examine the traffic to apply filters and load-balancing rules, and then distribute the requests across a pool of VMs that run your application. In Azure, there are a couple of different ways to load-balance traffic, such as if you need to perform SSL off-loading on large applications that use encrypted network traffic. In this chapter, you learn about the various load-balancer components, and how to configure traffic rules and filters and distribute traffic to VMs. You build on the high-availability components from the previous chapter and get ready for the next chapter on how to scale resources.