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2018-11-12 |
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Find out about new and updated features in IBM© Cloud Load Balancer.
IBM Cloud Load Balancer now supports Layer 7 load balancing. With Layer 7 (L7) support, traffic can be redirected to a URL, rejected, or distributed to L7 pool members, including bare-metal and virtual-server instances. Incoming data traffic is classified by using Layer 7 policies and rules. The policies define what action to take when the data traffic matches the rules associated with them.
Refer to Layer 7 load balancing for additional details.
IBM Cloud Load Balancer now scales up automatically when its load increases, and scales down as it decreases. When you create a load balancer, it starts with two appliances, but the number of appliances can be increased to 16 (as of this writing) as the monitoring system detects an increase in the load. The IP addresses of each of the active appliances is added as DNS A-Records to the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the load balancer.
A highly demanded “internal” version of our IBM Cloud Load Balancer is now available. This load balancer is not exposed publicly, but can still be used to balance applications within their IBM Cloud private networks (in a multi-tiered deployment, for instance, as shown in the figure).
It is both secure and consistent with the previous versions of IBM Cloud Load Balancer on the public side.
You can now leverage the “IBM Cloud Monitoring” service to monitor the following performance metrics associated with your load balancer and application:
- Throughput
- Connection rate
- Active connections
Up to two weeks of samples are collected and displayed by the load balancer web UI. The data can also be viewed on the IBM Cloud Monitoring service portal. If you require data for longer than two weeks, depending on the volume of other cloud metrics you may be sending to your Cloud Monitoring instance, you may need to upgrade your monitoring plan. Refer to Monitoring-Metrics for additional details
This feature requires your IBM Cloud IaaS and PaaS accounts to be linked, with a few simple steps 
.
You can now customize the cipher suites that are used when the load balancer is configured for SSL termination.
When you enable SSL termination on IBM Cloud Load Balancer (by selecting HTTPS as the front-end protocol), a carefully selected default set of cipher suites is enabled that conform to security best practices. IBM keeps a close watch on any new vulnerabilities that may be discovered, and updates the list accordingly. This, along with the seamless security updates of software and hardware components, helps to keep your applications secure at all times.
Refer to Custom Cipher Suite for additional details.