Determine load balancer SKUs

  • 3 minutes

When you create an Azure Load Balancer, you select the type (Internal or Public) of load balancer. You also select the SKU. The load balancer supports both Basic and Standard SKUs, each differing in scenario scale, features, and pricing. The Standard Load Balancer is the newer Load Balancer product with an expanded and more granular feature set over Basic Load Balancer. It is a superset of Basic Load Balancer.

Screenshot of the Load Balancer instance page. The type is Internal, the SKU is basic, and VNet is associated.

Capabilities

Feature

Basic SKU

Standard SKU

Backend pools

Up to 300 instances

Up to 1000 instances

Health probes

HTTP, TCP

HTTPS, HTTP, TCP

Availability zones

Not available

Zone-redundant and zonal frontends for inbound and outbound traffic.

Multiple front ends

Inbound only

Inbound and outbound

Secure by default

Open by default. NSG optional.

Closed to inbound flows unless allowed by an NSG. Internal traffic from the virtual network to the internal load balancer is allowed.

SLA

Not available

99.99%

Note

The Basic SKU can be upgraded to the Standard SKU. But, new designs and architectures should use the Standard Load Balancer.