Like your traditional datacenter load balancer, Azure load balancer provides an ability to scale your application and create high availability for your services. Azure load balancer is layer 4 device and understands TCP and UDP packets. There are two types of azure load balancers are available:

• Internal Load Balancer
• Public Load Balancer

Let me show, how to create and configure load balancer step-by-step.

Login to the Azure Portal and select “+ Create a resource”. Select the “Networking” and then select “Load Balancer”.

Enter the name of the load balancer and set the load balancer type to either Internal or Public based on your business requirements.

If you select “Basic” sku for public load balancer then define public ip address, subscription, resource group, and location.

Standard SKU supports many advance features than the basic sku. If you want to know more about the difference between basic and standard sku, read Why use Standard Load Balancer?

If you create an internal load balancer with standard sku, you get an option to select virtual network and subnet.

Azure load balancer with standard sku provides an option to select availability zone.

If you select Internal Azure Load Balancer with SKU, you get two options for IP address assignment i.e. Static and Dynamic.

If you select static ip address assignment then you assign private ip address manually.

In my configuration, I am creating Internal Azure Load Balancer with Basic SKU.

I am using private configuration for my internal load balancer. Once completed the configuration, click on “Create” to deploy load balancer.

Once completed, you can review the basic configuration from overview panel.

In Frontend IP configuration under settings, you can review and add the LoadBalancerFrontEnd Ip addresses.

In Backend pools under settings, you can define add virtual machines that needs to be managed by the load balancer. Click on Add to configure backend pool.

Set the name and associate the backend pool with different types of virtual machines configurations, and click on OK.

In Health probes panel under settings, you get an option to add probes to check the health of your service endpoints. Click on “Add” to configure the health probes.

Configure the Name, Protocol, Port, Interval and Unhealthy threshold options based on your requirements.

In the Load balancing rules panel under settings, click on “Add” to create the load balancing rules.

Define the load balancing rules based on your requirement.

Once completed with the configuration, click on OK to create a rule with defined parameters.

You can also define Inbound NAT rules, click on “Add” to create NAT rules.

Define inbound NAT rules based on your requirement and click on “OK” to create.

In the properties section, you can look at the load balancer properties.

Under the locks section, you can create and configure the lock type to prevent changes and protecting the azure load balancer.

I hope, this article helped you to understand, create, configure and manage Azure load balancers.