Load Balancer

What is IBM Cloud® Load Balancer?

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

VPC load balancers

Classic load balancers

Application load balancer

Distribute Layer 4 and Layer 7 traffic among multiple server instances.

Configure, price and quote

Network load balancer

Distribute Layer 4 client requests among workload servers.

Configure, price and quote

Compare offerings

See which option is right for your workload.

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Why IBM Cloud Load Balancer

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.

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.

Use cases

About IBM Cloud Network Load Balancer for VPC

Deploy isolated workloads across multiple locations and zones

About IBM Cloud Network Load Balancer for VPC

Use the IBM Cloud Network Load Balancer for VPC (NLB) to distribute traffic among multiple server instances within the same region of your VPC. Network load balancers can accept members across all three availability zones, while the NLB itself resides in one specific zone.

Learn more

IBM Cloud certifications and training

Start your journey with free learning.

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Other IBM Cloud networking products

IBM Cloud 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 Balancer in minutes.

Provision for VPC

Provision for Classic