Configure load balancers

Load balancers provide a stable public IP address for routing external TCP or UDP traffic to your services and addons. They operate at Layer 4, distributing connections across one or more backends. Managed at the team level, a single load balancer can route traffic to workloads across multiple projects.

To create a load balancer:

1. Navigate to Cloud → Load balancers from your team menu
2. Click Create load balancer

Basic information

1. Name: Provide a name for the load balancer
2. Description: (Optional) Describe the purpose
3. Protocol: Select TCP or UDP

Target

Choose where the load balancer is provisioned:

For PaaS (managed cloud):

• Select a region (e.g., europe-west, us-east)

For BYOC:

• Select a specific cluster
• Your cluster must support the provisioning of load balancers (contact support if needed)

Ports

Configure which ports the load balancer listens on. You can specify:

• Single port: 80
• Multiple ports: 80,443,8080
• Port range: 8000-9000

You can configure up to 100 ports per load balancer.

Restriction: Ports 30000-32767 are reserved and cannot be used.

Backends

For each port, configure one or more backends to receive traffic.

For each backend, specify:

1. Project: Select the project containing the service or addon
2. Service or addon: Select the backend workload
3. Container port: The port on the service/addon (1-65535)
4. Weight: Traffic proportion (1-100)

Backend requirements:

• Services must be running (not paused)
• Projects must be deployed in the same region or cluster as the load balancer
• For addon backends, only PostgreSQL is currently supported

Traffic weights: Weights across all backends for a port must sum to 100. Traffic is distributed proportionally based on these weights.

Create

Click Create load balancer to provision the infrastructure. Provisioning typically takes a few minutes.

Each backend's traffic share is its weight divided by the total weight across all backends for that port. Weights must sum to 100.

To modify an existing load balancer:

1. Navigate to the load balancer settings
2. Update configuration:
   • Add or remove ports
   • Add, remove, or modify backends
   • Adjust backend weights
3. Click Update load balancer

Important: Updating a load balancer triggers re-provisioning. There may be a brief traffic interruption during the update.

Load balancers progress through these states:

Once a load balancer reaches Provisioned state, you'll see one or more public IP addresses. Point your DNS A records to these IPs.

To use a custom domain:

1. Wait for the load balancer to reach Provisioned state
2. Copy the public IP address
3. Create an A record in your DNS provider pointing to the load balancer IP

Example: app.example.com A 203.0.113.42

Load balancers can be included in Northflank templates for infrastructure as code.

Example template node:

{
  "kind": "LoadBalancer",
  "ref": "production-lb",
  "spec": {
    "name": "production-load-balancer",
    "description": "Load balancer for production traffic",
    "spec": {
      "type": "tcp",
      "target": {
        "type": "region",
        "targetId": "europe-west"
      },
      "ports": [
        {
          "id": "port-80",
          "port": "80",
          "backends": [
            {
              "id": "${refs.production-project.id}/${refs.web-service.id}",
              "type": "service",
              "port": 8080,
              "weight": 100
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "id": "port-443",
          "port": "443",
          "backends": [
            {
              "id": "${refs.production-project.id}/${refs.web-service.id}",
              "type": "service",
              "port": 8443,
              "weight": 100
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

No TLS termination: Load balancers operate at Layer 4 only. Handle TLS in your application, or use Northflank's built-in domains for HTTP workloads.

No rate limiting: Load balancers do not provide rate limiting or connection limits. Implement these at the application level.

BYOC and BYOK clusters: Load balancers use the Kubernetes Gateway API with automated provisioning on the cloud provider side. BYOC clusters support load balancers (on AWS, provisioned as Network Load Balancers). For BYOK clusters, contact support to confirm whether your cloud provider supports this feature.