Simplified load balancing of your business application servers
Overview
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.
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.
How load balancers are used
- VPC load balancers
- Classic load balancers
Distribute Layer 4 and Layer 7 traffic among multiple server instances.
Distribute Layer 4 client requests among workload servers.
See which option is right for your workload.
Monitor server health and protect against server failure.
Gain advanced features and high performance.
See which option is right for your workload.
Features
Enhance availability, security and control
Modernizes ALB with smarter health checks, FQDN-based dynamic backends, and flexible routing for improved reliability and cloud capability.
Adds zero‑trust security with client certificate authentication, CRL-based revocation, and optional backend mTLS for full end‑to‑end protection.
Distribute traffic among multiple server instances within the same region of your VPC.
Use cases
See IBM Cloud Load Balancer in action
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.
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.
Resources
Learn and explore
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, ALB can authenticate client certificates during the TLS handshake, helping ensure that only trusted users, applications, and services can access workloads.