How does Windows Azure perform load balancing?

azure load-balancing
jvenema picture jvenema · Feb 14, 2010 · Viewed 20.2k times · Source

I was trying to read up on load balancing in Windows Azure, and all the information about it is extremely vague and non-specific. All I really want is a simple answer: how does Azure perform load balancing?

Many applications use sessions or in-memory data to increase performance. With Azure, I'm not sure if this is possible, because (from what I can tell), Azure doesn't have any sort of "sticky" sessions. Even if it wasn't session-based, but simply IP-based balancing, that would be enough for many applications.

So, the question of the day - how exactly does Azure perform its load balancing?

Answer

Andy Britcliffe picture Andy Britcliffe · Nov 11, 2010

Ok to give a correct answer here - Azure DOES support load balancing in front of both web and worker roles (so the answer marked as best on this thread is completely wrong), but it does not support Affinity load balancing which is what jvenema was asking for I think. The current implementation uses round robin behaviour.

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