OCI Flexible Load Balancing
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Flexible Load Balancing enables customers to distribute web requests across a fleet of servers or automatically route traffic across fault domains, availability domains, or regions—yielding high availability and fault tolerance for any application or data source. The portfolio comprises two services—Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Flexible Load Balancer (OCI Load Balancer) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Flexible Network Load Balancer (OCI Network Load Balancer).
OCI Flexible Load Balancer primarily manages HTTP/HTTPS traffic and provides advanced routing features that distribute the requests based on the requests’ contents. In contrast, OCI Flexible Network Load Balancer performs at low latency, offering extreme performance.
Flexible Load Balancing features
Balance network traffic and workloads, either publicly or privately, to support scaling, high availability, and ensure application responsiveness.
Gain high availability
OCI Flexible Load Balancer offers a public IP address to front-end internet traffic within a single availability domain or across regions, ensuring applications are always available during peak demand.
Optimize traffic routing
Match your load balancing policy to your application requirements and optimize efficiency and reliability. Customers choose from round-robin, least connections, IP hash load balancing, or customized policies.
Learn more about Load Balancing policiesMultiple protocol flexibility
Customers use rules to define routing policies to balance incoming traffic with supported protocols such as TCP, HTTP, HTTP/2, and WebSockets. Automate load balancing tasks via API or web console.
TLS termination/SSL offloading
Transport Layer Security (TLS) termination decrypts SSL-encrypted data traffic (think of TLS as providing the ‘S’ in HTTPS). SSL termination also works to increase site and web application performance by reducing the workload scope of back-end servers. Customers can handle very high throughput SSL handshakes with the 8 Gbps load balancer shape.
Learn more about managing certificates on load balancersSecurity built-in
Gain support for the modern TLS 1.2 protocol along with strong cipher suite for a secure front end to your application tier. Protect all traffic to your cloud with TLS encryption, and offload TLS handshakes to the load balancer. Leverage security lists to configure inbound and outbound access policies at the infrastructure level.
Low global pricing
Customer spend on load balancing is transparent and predictable, thanks to consistent global pricing, which offers savings of 100% or more in some geographies relative to competitors. For example, AWS ELB Network Load Balancer in Tokyo Japan is priced at 115% more ($0.0243 per Load Balancer-hour) than OCI Load Balancing ($0.0113 per Load Balancer-hour). OCI Flexible Network Load Balancer is offered at no cost to the customer.
Learn more about Load Balancing pricingFlexible performance
Create load balancers that will meet the performance you need and don’t be afraid of a surprise bill. OCI Flexible Load Balancer provides instant readiness for your workloads with minimum bandwidth and autoscales bandwidth based on the client traffic up to the defined maximum bandwidth. OCI Flexible Network Load Balancer scales up elastically based on incoming client traffic with no bandwidth configuration required.
Pass-through layer 4 (TCP/UDP) load balancing
Flexible Network Load Balancer preserves the original client packet (IP/Port) characteristics and load-balances them as is, without terminating the client session. The load-balancing decision is based on a hash of source/destination IP/Port and protocol information. It can provide network flow connection persistence based on client source IP and ensure that the subsequent requests from a client session are sent to the same back-end server.
WAF enforcement
Directly apply and enforce Oracle Cloud Infrastructure WAF protection on your flexible load balancer for both public and private instances to secure both your internet-facing and internal (VCN only) application workloads. OCI WAF helps protect against OWASP Top 10 attacks, layer 7 DDOS and insider threats, and provides enhanced security for your in-region application workloads.
Learn more about WAF
Managed service provider gains competitive advantage and lowers costs by 30%
Data Intensity realized they could gain cost savings by migrating non-production and disaster recovery environments to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Their move resulted in 10X faster deployment and a 30% reduction in infrastructure costs. Data Intensity now runs customers' Oracle E-Business Suite workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute and Block Volumes, and they leverage Oracle’s highly scalable OCI File Storage for shared file systems during deployments to help optimize capacity consumption.
Announcing OCI WAF Protection on Flexible Load Balancers
Gopi Gopalakrishnan, Senior Product Manager, Oracle Cloud InfrastructureWe are committed to being a reliable partner by providing a highly secure platform and native security services to help protect your applications. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Web Application Firewall (WAF) is one such critical service and an important part of the broader security posture of your application. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of OCI WAF enforcement on Flexible Load Balancer service. With this enhancement, you can now directly apply and enforce OCI WAF protection on your Flexible Load Balancer (both Public and Private) instances in addition to WAF edge enforcement on your web applications.
Read the complete postFeatured blogs
- April 19, 2021 Flexible network load balancer sandwich topology with Check Point CloudGuard Network Security
- April 8, 2021 How to use a flexible network load balancer with a Palo Alto Networks virtual firewall appliance
- March 24, 2021 Announcing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Flexible Network Load Balancer
- March 17, 2021 Advanced HTTP Routing and HTTP/2 support for OCI Flexible Load Balancing service
- December 8, 2020 Announcing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Flexible Load Balancing
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