Announcing early access to DigitalOcean Internal Load Balancer: Scale your private workloads with ease

Sr. Product Manager II

Posted: October 17, 2024•3 min read

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For teams building cloud-native applications, secure and efficient internal traffic routing is critical to scaling private workloads as it enables better resource utilization, helps maintain data privacy, and enhances application performance. That’s why we’re excited to announce Early Access to DigitalOcean’s Internal Load Balancer (ILB), a regional load balancer designed to help scale your internal workloads. With ILB, you can easily distribute incoming HTTP, TCP, or UDP traffic across your Droplets and Kubernetes (DOKS) clusters using private IP addresses, which reduces exposure of your services to the public internet.

Private load balancing on DigitalOcean was previously only possible using cumbersome workarounds. Customers either had to manually manage proxy software like Nginx or HAProxy on a Droplet or use an external load balancer with firewall rules to restrict public access. While functional, these methods required extra configuration, maintenance, and overhead, which added complexity to the process of scaling internal workloads.

But with Internal Load Balancer, scaling internal workloads is much simpler.

Internal Load Balancer is designed to simplify internal traffic routing while maintaining security and performance. With Internal Load Balancer, developers can scale their private workloads while reducing exposure of traffic to the public internet by not relying on public IPv4 addresses. For SMBs looking to scale private workloads within a VPC or scale application tiers using a private IP, can use DigitalOcean’s Internal Load Balancer.

Key Benefits of Internal Load Balancer

Similar to our HTTP LBaaS, every single Internal Load Balancer supports 10,000 simultaneous connections, 250 SSL connections, and up to 10,000 requests per second with high availability.

Here’s what you get with Internal Load Balancer:

Simplified management: Create an ILB in a few clicks and scale your private workloads. No more manual workarounds.
Private load balancing: ILB allows you to distribute traffic using private IPs, helping to ensure that your internal workloads remain secure and shielded from the public internet. Unlike our HTTP Load Balancer, an ILB comes with private-IP only.
Secured global scaling: Combine Internal Load Balancer with Global Load Balancer (GLB) to scale your workloads globally while keeping the backend services scalable, secure and isolated. Check out the guide on how to connect regional load balancers to GLB.
VPC peering support: Leverage Internal Load Balancer together with VPC peering to enable secure, private communication between services/pods across different VPCs.
DOKS service connectivity: You can expose DOKS services over the VPC network using Internal Load Balancer, keeping traffic internal. Read the tutorial on how to create an Internal Load Balancer in DOKS using K8s annotations.