The load balancer gives you control over how inbound communication is managed. This communication can include traffic that's initiated from Internet hosts or virtual machines in other cloud services or virtual networks.

An input endpoint listens on a public port and forwards traffic to an internal port. You can map the same ports for an internal or external endpoint or use a different port for them.

You can use port forwarding to redirect traffic from an incoming port to another port your server listens to. For example, your endpoint listens to port 443 and you have a web application on the server listening to port 8443. You can configure the endpoint to redirect the traffic from port 80 to port 8443 on the server.