Overview of Flexible Network Load Balancer

Understand what network load balancers are, and how to get access to links that provide details on specific network load balancer topics.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Flexible Network Load Balancer service (Network Load Balancer) provides automated traffic distribution from one entry point to multiple backend servers in your virtual cloud network (VCN). It operates at the connection level and load balances incoming client connections to healthy backend servers based on Layer 3/Layer 4 (IP protocol) data. The service offers a load balancer with your choice of a regional public or private IP address that is elastically scalable and scales up or down based on client traffic with no bandwidth configuration requirement.

Network Load Balancer provides the benefits of flow high availability, source and destination IP addresses, and port preservation. It is designed to handle volatile traffic patterns and millions of flows, offering high throughput while maintaining ultra low latency. Network load balancers have a default concurrent connection limit of 330,000 connections per Availability Domain (AD). In three AD regions, by default, network load balancers have a concurrent connection limit of one million. Network Load Balancer is the ideal load balancing solution for latency sensitive workloads.

Network Load Balancer is also optimized for long-running connections in the order of days or months. A given flow is always forwarded to the same backend for the lifetime of the connection, making it best suited for your database type applications. You can configure application-specific health checks to ensure that the load balancer directs traffic only to healthy backends.

The Network Load Balancer documentation contains the following major sections: