Load Balancing Services

What Is Load Balancing?

The term load balancing refers to the distribution of workloads across multiple computing resources. Load balancing aims to:

Load Balancing can also improve availability by sharing a workload across redundant computing resources.

Layer 4 load-balancing service (inbound and outbound, UDP and TCP protocols)
Azure Load Balancer is zone-redundant, ensuring high availability across Availability Zones

A DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables you to distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions
It load balances only at the domain level. For that reason, it can’t fail over as quickly as Front Door (because of common challenges around DNS caching and systems not honoring DNS TTLs)

A Layer-7, web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications
See: Azure Application Gateway

An application delivery network that provides global load balancing and site acceleration service for web applications
Offers Layer 7 capabilities for your application like SSL offload, path-based routing, fast failover, caching, etc.
Improves performance and high-availability of your applications

Azure portal

Traffic Manager:
- DNS based global routing
- Do not have requirements for Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol termination
- Application-layer (per-HTTP/HTTPS request) processing
Load Balancer:
- Network traffic load balancing
- Layer-4 load balancing
Application Gateway:
Layer-7 load balancing
Application layer (OSI layer 7) load balancing
Front Door:
- To optimize global routing of your web traffic
- Optimize top-tier end-user performance
- Reliability through quick global failover