Load Balancer Quickstart

DigitalOcean fully manages Regional Load Balancers and Global Load Balancers, ensuring they are highly available load balancing services. Load balancers distribute traffic to groups of Droplets in specific regions or across different regions, which prevents the health of a backend service from depending on the health of a single server or a single region.

Create Load Balancers

1. From the control panel, click Create in the top right, and then Load Balancers.
2. Choose a load balancer size, name, datacenter region, and forwarding rules. Make sure you choose the same datacenter region as any existing Droplets you want use in the backend.
3. Click Create Load Balancer. This takes you to the detail page of the new load balancer.

Add and Remove Droplets

All backend Droplets must be in the same region as the load balancer.

To add Droplets:

1. From the load balancer’s detail page, click Choose Droplets.
2. Select the Droplets or tag you want to use, then click Add Droplets. You can choose the Droplets for the backend in two ways: manually or by using a tag.

To remove Droplets:

1. From the load balancer’s detail page, click More next to the Droplet you’d like to remove.
2. In the More drop-down, click Remove.

Use SSL Certificates

Existing certificates, both Let’s Encrypt and custom, appear in the Certificate dropdown list when creating your load balancer and in the Forwarding Rules section of the Settings tab after creation. You can assign any existing certificates in the HTTPS and HTTP/2 forwarding rules.

To delete an existing certificate:

1. Open the Security menu.
2. In the Certificates section, open the More menu of the certificate you’d like to delete.
3. Click Delete and confirm the deletion.

You cannot delete certificates that are still in use. You can delete the forwarding rule or edit it so that it no longer uses the certificate, then return to the Certificates tab and delete it.

Delete Load Balancers

1. From load balancer’s detail page, click the Settings tab.
2. Click the red Destroy button, then the red Confirm button.

The Droplets associated with your load balancer stop receiving distributed traffic, but the Droplets themselves are not destroyed.