Why load balancing matters in Azure - See It in Action

Why Load Balancing Matters

📖 Scenario: You are managing a website hosted on Azure. Many users visit the site at the same time. To keep the website fast and reliable, you need to spread the work evenly across several servers.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Azure load balancer configuration that distributes traffic to two virtual machines. This will help the website handle many visitors without slowing down or crashing.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a resource group named MyResourceGroup

Create two virtual machines named VM1 and VM2

Create a load balancer named MyLoadBalancer that balances traffic between VM1 and VM2

Configure a backend address pool with VM1 and VM2

Set up a load balancing rule for HTTP traffic on port 80

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Load balancing helps websites and apps stay fast and reliable when many users visit at the same time.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and system administrators use load balancers to manage traffic and keep services available.

1

Create the resource group and virtual machines

Write Azure CLI commands to create a resource group called MyResourceGroup in the eastus region, and create two virtual machines named VM1 and VM2 inside this group.

Azure

# Your Azure CLI commands here to create resource group and VMs

Need a hint?

Use az group create to make the group, then az vm create twice for the two VMs.

2

Create the load balancer and backend pool

Write Azure CLI commands to create a load balancer named MyLoadBalancer in MyResourceGroup and create a backend address pool named MyBackendPool inside the load balancer.

Azure

az group create --name MyResourceGroup --location eastus
az vm create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name VM1 --image UbuntuLTS --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
az vm create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name VM2 --image UbuntuLTS --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
# Your Azure CLI commands here to create load balancer and backend pool

Need a hint?

Use az network lb create with --frontend-ip-name and --backend-pool-name options.

3

Add virtual machines to the backend pool

Write Azure CLI commands to add VM1 and VM2 network interfaces to the backend address pool named MyBackendPool of MyLoadBalancer.

Azure

az group create --name MyResourceGroup --location eastus
az vm create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name VM1 --image UbuntuLTS --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
az vm create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name VM2 --image UbuntuLTS --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
az network lb create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name MyLoadBalancer --sku Basic --frontend-ip-name MyFrontEnd --backend-pool-name MyBackendPool
# Your Azure CLI commands here to add VM1 and VM2 NICs to backend pool

Need a hint?

Use az network nic ip-config address-pool add to add NICs to the backend pool. The NIC names are usually VM1VMNic and VM2VMNic.

4

Create a load balancing rule for HTTP traffic

Write an Azure CLI command to create a load balancing rule named HTTPRule on MyLoadBalancer that listens on port 80 and forwards traffic to the backend pool MyBackendPool.

Azure

az group create --name MyResourceGroup --location eastus
az vm create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name VM1 --image UbuntuLTS --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
az vm create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name VM2 --image UbuntuLTS --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
az network lb create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name MyLoadBalancer --sku Basic --frontend-ip-name MyFrontEnd --backend-pool-name MyBackendPool
az network nic ip-config address-pool add --address-pool MyBackendPool --ip-config-name ipconfig1 --nic-name VM1VMNic --resource-group MyResourceGroup --lb-name MyLoadBalancer
az network nic ip-config address-pool add --address-pool MyBackendPool --ip-config-name ipconfig1 --nic-name VM2VMNic --resource-group MyResourceGroup --lb-name MyLoadBalancer
# Your Azure CLI command here to create HTTP load balancing rule

Need a hint?

Use az network lb rule create with the correct ports and names to set up HTTP load balancing.