Public preview: Load Balancer Standard

You can use Azure Load Balancer Standard to create public and internal load-balanced deployments with much greater scale, resiliency, and ease of use for all your virtual machine instances inside a virtual network. The preview includes the following key scenarios:

• Any virtual machine in a virtual network can now be part of the back-end pool, including up to 1,000 instances for virtual machine scale sets and multiple virtual machine scale sets. The backend pool is no longer limited to a single availability set.

• Advanced analytics through Azure Monitor are available, including continuous in-band measurements for data plane health, per-endpoint health probe status, and counters for packets, bytes, connection attempts, and outbound connections.

• Load balance across availability zones with zone-redundant and zonal public and internal Azure Load Balancer front ends and cross-zone load balancing for the back-end pool, as well as zone-redundant outbound connections.

• HA Ports is available on an internal load balancer, enabling more resilience and scalability for network virtual appliance scenarios and other applications. A single rule can be configured to load-balance TCP and UDP flows irrespective of layer 4 port and allows faster failover and n-Active scale-out.

• Network Security Groups are required for new public IP standard and any back-end instances for greater security and control.

• A new model for outbound SNAT connections provides greater resiliency and scale.

Load Balancer Standard is available in the following regions: East US 2, Central US, North Europe, West Central US, West Europe, Southeast Asia.