Configuring your Load Balancer's frontend

Reviewed on 13 December 2023 • Published on 05 June 2023

Frontend overview

Every Load Balancer must have at least one frontend, itself attached to a backend, in order to be functional.

You can create a frontend at the same time as creating the Load Balancer itself, or create an “empty” Load Balancer and create/add a frontend(s) later.

When creating a frontend and backend at the same time as creating the Load Balancer, you have access only to minimum configuration settings for the frontend:

Frontend name
Frontend port

When creating a new frontend (or editing an existing one) after creating the Load Balancer, you have access to additional settings:

Frontend name
Frontend port
SSL certificate
Backend to attach
Enable/disable HTTP/3

You can edit any of these settings after creating the frontend, whenever you wish.

You can create multiple frontends to listen on different ports, and connect them to different backends as required. You can also set up custom ACL rules and routes for each frontend.

Frontend name

You can use an automatically-generated random name suggested by the console, or choose your own name for the frontend.

Port

The frontend listens on the port you specify, and forwards received requests to the backend it is attached to.

For HTTP, a frontend will typically listen on port 80, while for HTTPS it will typically listen on port 443.

The port number must be between 1 and 65535.

SSL certificate

Note

You can only add an SSL certificate to a frontend after creation of the Load Balancer itself.

You can add an SSL/TLS certificate to your frontend to allow clients to securely connect to the Load Balancer via an encrypted connection. This is necessary for SSL bridging and SSL offloading configurations.

When creating a certificate you can generate a Let’s Encrypt certificate directly from the console, or import an existing certificate. This could be from a third-party Certificate Authority (CA) other than Let’s Encrypt, or be a self-signed certificate.

Find out more about creating and adding different types of SSL certificates in our dedicated documentation.

Attached backend

When creating a frontend at the same time as creating the Load Balancer, it is attached to the backend you also create at this time.

When creating a frontend after creating the Load Balancer, you can choose which of your existing backends to attach it to.

Note

You can attach different frontends to the same backend. They will all forward traffic to this backend. However, you cannot attach multiple backends to the same frontend. To forward traffic from the same frontend to various different backends depending on the client’s HTTP Host headers or SNI, create Routes for your frontend.

Enable / disable HTTP/3

Note

You can only access HTTP/3 settings after creation of the Load Balancer itself.

Enable HTTP/3 to allow HTTP/3 connections between the client and the Load Balancer’s frontend.

Note that in order to enable HTTP/3, the frontend must have an SSL/TLS certificate, and be attached to a backend set to HTTP protocol.

Read more about HTTP/3 in our dedicated documentation.