Azure Load Balancer Tutorial: Step-by-Step Setup Guide 2025

Azure Load Balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple virtual machines, improving availability and scaling out applications behind a single front-end IP address.

Step 1: Choose a Load Balancer SKU

Azure offers a Basic and a Standard SKU. Standard is recommended for production workloads since it supports availability zones, higher scale limits, and secure-by-default backend traffic.

Step 2: Create the Load Balancer

• Go to the Azure Portal and search for "Load Balancer"
• Select Public (internet-facing) or Internal (private network) type
• Choose the resource group, region, and SKU tier
• Assign a front-end public IP address

Step 3: Configure the Backend Pool

Add the virtual machines or VM scale set instances that should receive traffic. These VMs must be in the same virtual network as the load balancer.

Step 4: Set Up Health Probes

Health probes check VM instance health on a defined interval and port. Instances that fail the probe are automatically removed from traffic rotation until they recover.

Step 5: Create Load-Balancing Rules

Rules map a front-end IP and port to a backend pool and port, defining exactly how traffic should be distributed (for example, round-robin across all healthy VMs on port 80).