The Azure load balancer is a layer 4 (TCP, UDP) load balancer which distributes incoming traffic among healthy instances of a service or among virtual machines in Azure. You can compare it with well-known load balancers such as Citrix Netscaler, Microsoft TMG, or Windows server load balancer.

The Azure Resource Manager load balancer can distribute traffic that works with public IPs and Azure DNS entry. The following diagram shows the basic load balancing mechanism:

The feature list of an Azure load balancer is shown in the following sections.