Overview
What are IBM Cloud® load balancers?
With IBM Cloud load balancers, you can load balance traffic among your servers to help improve uptime. You can also easily scale your applications by adding or removing servers, with minimal disruption to your traffic flows.
IBM Cloud offers both VPC and classic load balancers. For VPC infrastructure, there are two varieties of load balancers: application load balancers for VPC and network load balancers for VPC. For classic infrastructure, IBM Cloud offers several options including IBM Cloud Load Balancer and Citrix NetScaler appliances.
How load balancers are used
Classic load balancers
Classic load balancers
IBM Cloud offers several options of load balancers for traditional public cloud environments, including IBM Cloud Load Balancer and Citrix NetScaler appliances.
Benefits
Why IBM Cloud load balancers
Quickly detect server failures
Monitor server health to help avoid sending traffic to down servers.
Offload SSL handshake
Allow servers to spend their cycles on real application processing.
Intelligent traffic distribution
Balance traffic with round robin, weighted round robin, and least connections.
Features
IBM Cloud load balancer features
Flexible features
Choose the features best suited to your needs.
Traffic request layers support
Choose between Layer 4 network and Layer 7 application load balancing capabilities within the 7-layer OSI model.
Deployment capabilities
Provisioning and management can be done through the UI, API, CLI and Terraform.
Other IBM Cloud networking products
Network security
Protect your network with firewalls and security groups to better secure both servers and users.
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
A streamlined Kubernetes experience to deploy and manage clusters. Scale your apps from lift-and-shift to cloud-native.
IBM Cloud Internet Services
Enhanced edge network services that protect and optimize apps from DDoS attacks, data theft and bot attacks
Next steps
Get started on IBM Cloud load balancers in minutes.