How to create a Load Balancer

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. When creating a Load Balancer, you will configure a frontend which receives requests from clients, and a backend which receives the requests from the frontend and distributes them between one or several servers. Later, you can add additional frontends and backends to your Load Balancer if you wish.

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 Load Balancer, the product creation page is displayed:

   

2. Click Create Load Balancer. 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. Currently we provide the following Availability Zones:

   • PAR1: Paris 1, France.
   • PAR2: Paris 2, France (innovative and sustainable availability zone).
   • AMS1: Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
   • AMS2: Amsterdam 2, The Netherlands.
   • WAW1: Warsaw, Poland.
   • WAW2: Warsaw, Poland.

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 an IP address for your Load Balancer. You can either allocate a new IP, or select one of your existing IPs.

7. Configure your Load Balancer’s frontend by entering a name and a port. The frontend will listen on this port, and forward the requests it receives from clients to the backend(s). Note that you cannot add an SSL certificate at this stage, but you can add one after the creation of the Load Balancer. Similarly, you will be able to enable HTTP/3 after adding a certificate.

   

8. Configure your Load Balancer’s backend by entering a name, and the protocol and port it should use to connect to the backend servers. Choose whether to activate TLS encryption and select also a proxy protocol option, health check method and add the server IPs (one or many) of the backend server(s) it should direct traffic to.

   

   Depending on the options you choose, you may be prompted for additional configurations such as the Verify certificate setting if you activate TLS encryption.

   For more information on choosing configuration settings for your Load Balancer’s backend, see our dedicated reference documentation.

9. Configure advanced settings if required:

   • S3 failover: activate the feature and enter a Scaleway Object Storage Bucket Website URL (e.g. https://my-bucket.s3-website.nl-ams.scw.cloud). If none of your backend servers are available, users will be redirected to this page.
     Note:

     The S3 failover feature is only available for Load Balancers using the HTTP protocol on their backend. Find out more about setting up a static website with Object Storage in our dedicated documentation.

   • Sticky session: activate the feature if you want a particular user session to stick to the same backend server. This is useful if your users need their requests to be served by a single server in order to maintain a consistent session. If relevant, you will be prompted to enter the name for a cookie that will bind users’ sessions to specific backend servers.

10. Click Create a Load Balancer.

Load Balancer limitations

The following technical limitations apply when using the Load Balancers product:

• Your external highly available IP address can only be IPv4. However it is possible to use IPv6 between your Load Balancer and backend servers.
• Each Load Balancer supports only one highly available frontend IP.

For further information, refer to the Load Balancers FAQ and API documentation.