IBM Cloud Load Balancer

Simplified load balancing of your business application servers

Provision for VPC Provision for Classic
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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.

     What is a Load Balancer? (8:07 min)
    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. Choose between Layer 4 network and Layer 7 application load balancing capabilities within the 7-layer OSI model.
    Flexible features & deployment

    Choose the features best suited to your needs. Provisioning and management can be done through the UI, API, CLI and Terraform.
    SAVE USD 1000
    Get USD 1,000 in credits to use toward any of your new IBM VPC resources—including all network and storage components.
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    How load balancers are used

    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.

         Compare now
    IBM Cloud Load Balancer

    Monitor server health and protect against server failure.

         Get started     Citrix NetScaler appliances

    Gain advanced features and high performance.

         Get started     Compare offerings


    See which option is right for your workload.

         Compare now
    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.

         Compare now
    IBM Cloud Load Balancer

    Monitor server health and protect against server failure.

         Get started     Citrix NetScaler appliances

    Gain advanced features and high performance.

         Get started     Compare offerings


    See which option is right for your workload.

         Compare now

    Features

    HTTP Bundle

    Modernizes ALB with smarter health checks, FQDN-based dynamic backends, and flexible routing for improved reliability and cloud capability.

    Learn more
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    mTLS

    Adds zero‑trust security with client certificate authentication, CRL-based revocation, and optional backend mTLS for full end‑to‑end protection.

    Learn more
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    Use cases

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    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
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    Deploy isolated workloads

    This tutorial walks you through the steps for setting up highly available and isolated workloads by provisioning IBM Cloud Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). You will create virtual server instances (VSIs) in multiple zones within one region to ensure the high availability of the application. You will also create additional VSIs in a second region and configure a global load balancer (GLB) to provide high availability between regions and reduce network latency for users in different geographies.
      Learn more

      Resources

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      HTTP Bundle for IBM Cloud Application
      IBM Cloud ALB for VPC now includes an HTTP Bundle with advanced health checks, FQDN-based backends, and flexible routing, improving reliability and control for modern, dynamic applications.
      mTLS Cloud
      mTLS Support for IBM Cloud Application
      mTLS, ALB can authenticate client certificates during the TLS handshake, helping ensure that only trusted users, applications, and services can access workloads.

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      Take the next step

      Get started on IBM Cloud Load Balancer in minutes.

      1. Provision for VPC
      2. Provision for Classic