How to create a Load Balancer

Reviewed on April 07, 2025

Load Balancers are highly available and fully-managed Instances which allow you to distribute your workload across your various servers. They ensure the scaling of all your applications while securing their continuous availability, even in the event of heavy traffic. Load Balancers are commonly used to improve the performance and reliability of websites, applications, databases, and other services.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

• A Scaleway account logged into the console
• Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization

How to create a Load Balancer

1. Click Load Balancers in the Network section of the Scaleway console side menu. If you have not already created a Load Balancer, the product creation page is displayed.

2. Click Create Load Balancer or the plus icon button. The creation wizard displays.

3. Enter a name for your Load Balancer. Optionally, you can also add a description and assign tags to help organize your Load Balancers.

4. Choose the Availability Zone in which your Load Balancer will be deployed geographically.

5. Select a Load Balancer type, according to your needs in terms of bandwidth and whether you want to be able to attach backend servers from other cloud providers than Scaleway (Multi-cloud provider).

6. Select the accessibility of your Load Balancer. Choose either:

   • Private: A private Load Balancer will have no public IP address, and is only accessible from the Private Network(s) it is attached to. You can attach your Load Balancer to a Private Network after creation of the Load Balancer. Read more about private Load Balancers.
   • Public: A public Load Balancer is accessible from the internet via its public IP address. You must choose from the following IP options:
     • IPv4: A public IPv4 address is obligatory. You can either allocate a new IPv4 address, or select one of your existing flexible IPv4 addresses.
     • IPv6: You can optionally add a public IPv6 address in addition to the IPv4 address. You can either allocate a new IPv6 address, or select one of your existing flexible IPv6 addresses.

   Accessibility cannot be modified after creation of the Load Balancer. For more information about managing your Load Balancer's public IPs, see our dedicated documentation.

7. Choose one of the following options:

• Click Create Load Balancer to finish now and create your Load Balancer without any frontends or backends. You can configure and add frontends and backends to your Load Balancer whenever you want after creation.
• Click Create and add front and backend to create your Load Balancer and also immediately proceed to configuring a frontend and backend for it. See how to create frontends and backends for help with this step.