Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing distributes incoming traffic across multiple Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute instances. It enables you to increase the fault tolerance of your application and optimize the available bandwidth for your application traffic by providing preprovisioned load balancing capacity.
You should use Oracle Load Balancing when you require either a public or a private load balancer as an entry point to automatically distribute incoming traffic to multiple servers within your virtual cloud network (VCN).
You can create a load balancer in the networking section of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure management console.
You can create a load balancer in the networking section of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure management console. Click "Load Balancers" and then "Create Load Balancer." Alternatively, you can use the CreateLoadBalancer API.
The load balancer checks for incoming traffic on its IP address and distributes that traffic to a list of backend servers, based on the load balancing and health check policies that you have defined in a logical entity called a backend set. The backend set determines how the load balancer directs traffic to the collection of backend servers.
You can define the policies that tell the load balancer how to distribute incoming traffic to the backend servers. Currently, we support the following load balancing policies:
For more information, see How Load Balancing Policies Work in the documentation.
Alternatively, you can determine the health of a load balancer instance in relation to its backend servers in a programmatic way via the load balancer health API.
The load balancer health API is a programmatic mechanism for determining the health of a load balancer instance in relation to its backend servers.
You should use the health API when you wish to build your own notification and monitoring system or integrate with a system you are currently using.
When you programmatically poll the load balancer health API, you can obtain a 3-state health status (okay, warning, and critical) indicating the health of each backend server or, as an aggregate of all backend servers in a backend set, the entire backend set.
The load balancer listener which is a logical entity that checks for incoming traffic on the load balancers IP address. You configure a listener's protocol and port number, and the optional SSL settings.
Currently supported protocols include:
For more information, see Managing Load Balancer Listeners in the documentation.
Yes, the load balancer can handle TCP, HTTP and HTTPS traffic at the same time. To do so, you must configure multiple listeners.
You can load balance for any port between 1-65535.
No. Currently, you need to specify the individual TCP port you want to load balance.
Yes. IPv6 is supported.
Yes. You can optionally terminate SSL at the load balancer. To use SSL with your load balancer, you must add one or more certificate bundles to your system. The certificate bundle you upload includes the public certificate, the corresponding private key, and any associated certificate authority certificates. To terminate SSL at the load balancer, you must create a listener at a default port such as 443, and then associate an uploaded certificate bundle with the listener.
Yes. You can optionally implement SSL tunneling for your TCP load balancer and tunnel incoming SSL connections to your application servers.
The load balancing service supports TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 protocols. You can choose from one of the Oracle-provided cipher suites or create your own custom cipher suite with specific ciphers. For more details please refer to:
Yes. You can enable for your HTTP load balancer server-side, cookie-driven session persistence
Yes. You can you can add, alter, or remove HTTP headers with the listener rule sets feature. A rule set is a named set of rules associated with a load balancer and applied to one or more listeners on that load balancer. Rules are objects that represent actions applied to requests or responses at a load balancer listener. Examples of how rule sets can help you enhance site security include:
Yes. You can limit access to the load balancing service via a policy written by an administrator.
Yes. Both the public and private load balancers can be deployed as regional services using the VCN regional subnet option. Regional subnets in a VCN span the entire region which can include multiple ADs. A regional subnet enables you to create a regional private or public load balancer that supports AD failover in the event of an AD outage in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure multi-AD region. Since a regional load balancer requires only one regional VCN subnet, it reduces the configuration and management overhead required by multiple AD-local subnets.
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Flexible Network Load Balancing (OCI Network Load Balancer) provides automated traffic distribution from one entry point to multiple back-end servers in your virtual cloud network (VCN). It operates at the connection level and load-balances incoming client connections to healthy back-end servers based on Layer 3/Layer 4 (IP protocol) data.
You should use OCI Network Load Balancer when you require a low-latency, high-throughput, layer-4 (TCP/UDP/ICMP) load balancing solution.
You can create a network load balancer in the networking section of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure management console. Click "Load Balancers" and then "Create Load Balancer” and Choose type “Network Load Balancer." Alternatively, you can use the CreateNetworkLoadBalancer API.
To learn more about network load balancers, see the flexible network load balancer overview section of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation.
The load balancer checks for incoming traffic on its IP address and distributes that traffic to a list of back-end servers, based on the load balancing and health check policies that you have defined in a logical entity called a back-end set. The back-end set determines how the network load balancer directs traffic to the collection of backend servers.
You can define the policies that tell the load balancer how to distribute incoming traffic to the back-end servers. Currently, we support the following load balancing policies:
For more information, see How Load Balancing Policies Work in the documentation.
The network load balancer listener, which is a logical entity that checks for incoming traffic on the load balancers IP address. You configure a listener's protocol and port number.
Currently supported protocols include:
Yes, the load balancer can handle TCP, UDP, and ICMP traffic at the same time. To do so, you must configure multiple listeners or configure wildcard listener (TCP/UDP/ICMP) with port 0 to match all protocols and port numbers.
You can load-balance for any port between 1-65535.
No. Currently, you need to specify the individual TCP port you want to load-balance. You can alternatively specify port 0 to listen for all TCP ports.
No. The network load balancer currently only supports IPv4 traffic.
No. You can use the OCI flexible load balancer to terminate SSL at the load balancer.
Yes. You can limit access to the network load balancing service via a policy written by an administrator.
Yes. Both the public and private load balancers can be deployed as regional services using the VCN regional subnet option. Regional subnets in a VCN span the entire region, which can include multiple ADs. A regional subnet enables you to create a regional private or public load balancer that supports AD failover in the event of an AD outage in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure multi-AD region. Since a regional load balancer requires only one regional VCN subnet, it reduces the configuration and management overhead required by multiple AD-local subnets.