Introduction
You're responsible for networking at Adatum, a new and expanding online commerce store. Adatum has several three-tier applications that run on virtual machines (VMs) that were migrated from on-premises datacenters. These VMs are hosted across various virtual networks. Some of the applications are available to the public internet and others should be accessible only to users at Adatum’s main office location in Sydney.
When the applications were hosted on-premises, various hardware devices used Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model Layer 4 load balancing to distribute incoming traffic across the web-tier VMs and across the middle-tier VMs that perform data analysis and transformation tasks. These Layer 4 devices were configured so that you could use remote desktop protocol to connect to individual VMs to perform administrative tasks. The hardware devices would also stop forwarding traffic to any VM that experienced a failure and ensured that client traffic for a session only occurred with one VM in the back-end pool. Now that the VMs are migrated to Azure, you would like to replicate the functionality provided by the Layer 4 hardware devices using native Azure services. You believe you can accomplish this goal with Load Balancer.
Azure Load Balancer distributes inbound traffic across a set of VMs in a back-end pool. The back-end pool can be made up of Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) VMs or instances in a Virtual Machine Scale Set. You can configure how incoming traffic is distributed across the back-end pool using load-balancing rules. You can ensure that traffic isn't directed to unresponsive nodes using health probes.
This module explains what Azure Load Balancer does, how it works, and when you should choose to use Load Balancer as a solution to meet your organization's needs.
Learning objectives
In this module, you'll:
- Learn what Azure Load Balancer is and the functionality it provides.
- Determine whether Load Balancer meets the needs of your organization.
Prerequisites
- Understanding of basic networking concepts