Microsoft Corporation has lately introduced a new tier of the load balancer to Azure Standard Load Balancer, along with the previous which is now renamed to Basic Load Balancer. This article compares the two and delineates why deploying Standard Load Balancer is the best idea.

  1. Backend pool size

It is a set of machines or services that are being load balanced for scaling and high availability. The basic load balancer is only limited to 100 instances, whereas the Standard tier can scale out more than 1000 instances.

  1. Endpoints

They are the machines or services that create a backend pool. The Basic Tier is quite limiting. It can only have a single availability set, virtual machine scale set or a single machine. The Standard Tier can span any virtual machine in a single virtual network which includes blends of scale sets, availability sets, and machines.

  1. Availability Zones

The Standard Tier scale up a service out across 3 zones in a single region for a 99.99 percent service level agreement or SLA. The Basic Tier is limited to non-availability zone deployments.

  1. Diagnostics

The Basic tier provides some diagnostics via Log Analytics, but the Standard tier provides much more data via Azure Monitor.

  1. HA Ports

The Basic tier usually offers an active or passive solution with virtual firewalls. HA Ports is a feature of the Standard tier which lets the virtual firewalls to become active or active. It also lets scaling out for high traffic deployments.

  1. Secure by Defaults

The Basic tier is dependent on network security groups or NSGs or virtual appliances to protect virtual machines. The Standard tier is protected by default and needs an NSG to explicitly allow traffic via a public IP address.