Azure Load Balancer vs. Azure Application Gateway

Azure Load Balancer is a cloud-based service designed to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple virtual machines (VMs) or virtual machine scale sets (VMSS), ensuring high availability and scalability for applications. Operating at Layer 4 of the OSI model, it efficiently manages both inbound and outbound traffic, providing low latency and high throughput for TCP and UDP applications. Key Features and Functionality: - High Availability: Distributes traffic across VMs within and across availability zones, enhancing application resilience.

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Unlike traditional load balancers that operate at the transport layer (Layer 4), Application Gateway operates at the application layer (Layer 7), allowing it to make routing decisions based on attributes such as URL paths and host headers. This capability provides more control over how traffic is distributed to your applications, enhancing both performance and security.