Load Balancers

DigitalOcean Load Balancers are a fully-managed, highly available service that distributes traffic to pools of Droplets. They decouple backend service health from the health of a single server to ensure that your services stay online.

The advantages of including a Load Balancer in your infrastructure include:

• Availability. All Load Balancers automatically monitor their backend pools and only send requests to Droplets that pass user-customizable health checks. Additionally, Load Balancers themselves also have automatic failover, so the internal components are resilient in the same way to failures at the balancing layer.
• Flexibility. Using a load balancer as a gateway gives you the flexibility to change your backend infrastructure without affecting the availability of your services, enabling seamless horizontal scaling, rolling deployments, large architecture redesigns, and more.
• Performance. Sharing the processing workload among a group of servers rather than relying on a single server prevents any one machine from being overwhelmed by requests.

You can modify the behavior of your Load Balancer to suit your needs without the burden of managing its operational complexities.

Load Balancers support multiple protocols and can manage SSL certificates. Because DigitalOcean Load Balancers are network load balancers, not application load balancers, they do not support directing traffic to specific backends based on URLs, cookies, HTTP headers, etc.

• Load Balancer Overview

High-level information, like plans and pricing, availability, feature overviews, and known issues.

• Load Balancer Quickstart

Just the essentials to go from zero to working in a few minutes.

• Load Balancer How-Tos

How to accomplish specific tasks in detail, like creation/deletion, configuration, and management.

• Load Balancer Resources

Resources on native tools for working with Load Balancers and Load Balancer performance tips.