Network load balancer

A network load balancer is used to evenly distribute the load across cloud resources. A load balancer is created in a folder and can serve resources from multiple availability zones. Only one target group can be attached to each load balancer. The health of resources in that group is monitored through a health check. A load balancer's listener is responsible for receiving traffic.

The Yandex Cloud Network Load Balancer is running at Layer 4 of the OSI model. It uses technologies running at Layer 3 to speed up data packet processing.

Traffic is distributed using the 5-tuple approach, i.e., based on the source IP, source port, destination IP, and destination port of the recipient cloud resource, as well as on the protocol type.

When creating a network load balancer, a pre-created target group is attached to it with cloud resources that incoming traffic will be distributed across. Each cloud resource in a target group is defined by a pair of the internal IPv4 address and subnet ID. Targets within one group must be located in the same cloud network. Targets within a single availability zone must be located in the same subnet.

By hosting resources in different availability zones, you ensure their fault tolerance: if there are targets in every availability zone and they are ready to receive traffic, the traffic is distributed across all zones. If all targets in an availability zone fail, traffic is no longer routed to this zone. Instead, it's distributed across the remaining zones.

For detailed recommendations on how to use a load balancer, see Best practices.

Network load balancer status

A created load balancer can have one of the following statuses:

• CREATING: the load balancer is being created.
• STARTING: the load balancer is being started.
• ACTIVE: the load balancer is running, performing health checks, and routing traffic to the target group resources.
• STOPPING: the load balancer is being stopped.
• STOPPED: the load balancer is stopped and is not performing health checks or distributing traffic.
• DELETING: the load balancer is being deleted.
• INACTIVE: the load balancer has no listeners or the target groups attached to it contain no targets. The load balancer is not performing any checks or distributing any traffic.