Introducing Global Load Balancer: Scale your HTTP traffic globally

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our Global Load Balancer in Beta, a pivotal enhancement to our load balancer portfolio. This solution is engineered to bolster application resiliency, eliminate single points of failure, and significantly minimize end-user latency.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, ensuring your application is resilient across geographies is crucial as your business expands. DigitalOcean customers now have a robust solution that negates the need for third-party services to balance HTTP traffic across regions. Traditional global load balancing solutions often come with a steep learning curve, an overwhelming array of features, and unpredictable pricing.

DigitalOcean’s Global Load Balancer addresses these challenges head-on. It is designed to be intuitive, predictably priced, and tailored to the essential needs of SMBs for enhancing global resiliency. With our L7 Global Load Balancer, you can:

Balance HTTP/s requests based on geographical proximity

Connect Droplets from any DigitalOcean data center to increase your application’s global resiliency. By default, traffic is routed to the droplet nearest to your end user’s location, minimizing latency and providing faster response times.

Avoid regional single points of failure

Dynamic multi-region failover helps ensure business continuity. In the event of a data center outage or server failure, the load balancer automatically redirects traffic to healthy servers, reducing downtime and operational disruptions.

Minimize end-user latency

Leverage edge caching to reduce latency for globally distributed static assets. This feature improves web application load times and delivers a consistent user experience regardless of the user’s location.

Set traffic distribution priority

Our GLB operates in an active/active state, balancing requests based on geographical proximity. You also have the flexibility to configure it in an active/passive state by setting data center priorities according to your preference.

Enhance security and compliance

Our GLB comes with built-in DDoS protection that monitors and blocks malicious traffic, helping to ensure your application’s security and supporting compliance with regulatory standards.

Simple and straightforward setup

Enabling DigitalOcean’s Global Load Balancer is as easy as creating a regional load balancer. Follow the same user flow of creating a regional load balancer with six key differences, outlined below:

1. Select “Global”: Choose “Global” while creating the Load Balancer under Networking in the DO console.
2. Connect Droplets: Add any number of droplets from different data centers.
3. Connect Your Domain: Generate a new SSL certificate or use an existing one.
4. Create DNS Records: Point your domain to the load balancer’s IP address.
5. Set Traffic Distribution Priority: Assign priority to data centers based on your preference.
6. Validate Status: Once the health checks of droplets and domains turn active, your application is fronted by a global load balancer that can autoscale based on traffic spikes.

Pricing

DigitalOcean’s Global Load Balancer in Beta is priced at a base fee of $15 per month, which includes 1 TB of CDN data transfer ($0.02 per GB overage), 25 million GLB requests ($0.7/MM overage), and 5 domains ($0.14/per month per additional domain overage)*. The flat fee, combined with included allowances for requests and CDN data transfers, provides price predictability, allowing your business to start small and scale as needed. Follow this pricing documentation for more information.

Limitations

For Beta, you can create GLBs in all data centers except NYC1. The scope of the GLB is also limited to Droplets. Regional LBaaS or DOKS pods/services cannot be connected as resources to GLB. We will extend GLB support to NYC1 in the upcoming weeks followed by the support for regional LBaaS and DOKS pods/services.

Additional resources

• Product documentation: Learn how to set up and manage a Global Load Balancer.

• Sales team contact: Reach out to our sales team for assistance with migration, architecture reviews, deployments, and other infrastructure needs.

Get started today

Spin up a Global Load Balancer and support global resiliency for your applications. Embrace the future of global traffic management with DigitalOcean’s Global Load Balancer. Enhance your application’s performance, security, and resiliency, all while enjoying predictable and affordable pricing.

Get started today and experience the difference.

*Beta pricing is directional and is subjected to change upon GA.