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# Dedicated Load Balancers

> For the full documentation index, see: https://docs.mulesoft.com/llms.txt

CloudHub dedicated load balancers (DLBs) are an optional component of Anypoint Platform that enable
you to route external HTTP and HTTPS traffic to multiple Mule applications deployed to CloudHub
workers in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Dedicated load balancers enable you to:

- Handle load balancing among the different CloudHub workers that run your application.

  If the target CloudHub application has multiple workers and they don’t respond within the defined
  timeout, the DLB makes requests to the next worker sequentially. The
  [default timeout value](https://docs.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/lb-create-arm#create-a-load-balancer) is 300 seconds.

- Define SSL configurations to provide custom certificates and optionally enforce two-way SSL client
  authentication.

- Configure proxy rules that map your applications to custom domains.

  This enables you to host your applications under a single domain.

To use a dedicated load balancer in your environment, you must first create an Anypoint VPC. Because
you can associate multiple environments with the same Anypoint VPC, you can use the same dedicated
load balancer for your different environments.

You can view the load balancer and Anypoint VPC endpoints in your Anypoint Platform organization
from the API portal.

## Create and Configure a Dedicated Load Balancer

To create and configure a load balancer, you must be an administrator of the organization to which
the load balancer is associated.

DLB names must be unique across all DLBs defined in Anypoint Platform (by all MuleSoft customers).

There are three ways to create and configure a dedicated load balancer for your Anypoint VPC:

- [Runtime Manager](https://docs.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/lb-create-arm) from Anypoint Platform

- The [cloudhub load-balancer create](https://docs.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/cloudhub-cli#cloudhub-load-balancer-create) command from the
  Anypoint Platform CLI

- The [CloudHub REST API](https://docs.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/cloudhub-api) through these endpoints:

  - `anypoint.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/api/organizations/{orgid}/loadbalancers`

  - `anypoint.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/api/organizations/{orgid}/vpcs`

For a full description of `loadbalancers` and `vpcs` endpoints, see the
[CloudHub API](https://anypoint.mulesoft.com/exchange/portals/anypoint-platform/f1e97bc6-315a-4490-82a7-23abe036327a.anypoint-platform/cloudhub-api/).

## Dedicated Load Balancer Licensing

Each DLB unit that you purchase is the equivalent of two workers handling load balancing between
CloudHub workers. You can assign up to four load balancer units to a DLB. A DLB with four load
balancer units assigned has eight workers.

## Static IP Addresses

If you enable static IP addresses for a DLB, the number of static IP addresses allocated to the DLB
is equal to double the number of workers. For example, if your DLB has four workers, the DLB has
eight associated static IP addresses.

Half the static IPs (equal to the number of worker instances) are in use at any given time. When you
restart or update the DLB, the DLB switches to use the group of unused static IP addresses and
transitions the first group of static IP addresses to the unused state.

### Considerations

- Because static IPs change when you restart or update your DLB, use the DLB’s DNS address rather
  than the IP addresses when calling the DLB from an external service. Ensure that the client
  includes the necessary retry mechanisms to account for the DNS switch.

- To avoid connection issues when the load balancer is restarting, adhere to the DNS TTL (30
  seconds), including connection keep alive. Connection keep alive time is set to 60 seconds by
  default. The connections are closed after the new workers are online and the TTL expires.

- Switching between the two groups of static IP addresses enables zero-downtime restarts and
  updates, ensuring that no transactions are dropped or lost as long as the transaction times are
  shorter than 600 seconds or the value of **Mule Application Response Timeout** (whichever is
  smaller).

- DLB uses DNS-based routing to distribute traffic across DLB workers and returns the IP address of
  all DLB workers to the calling client. A single DLB worker might receive all the client traffic
  within the TTL window regardless of the amount of transactions per second. To avoid this, ensure
  that you have granular load distribution between the DLB workers by alternating between the IP
  addresses returned in the DNS resolution.

- When the DLB is stopped during configuration change, the DNS are deleted. If, at restart, there is
  DNS lookup, the `NXDOMAIN` error is cached for 15 minutes. To avoid this negative cache, ensure
  that you stop all API calls.

- Proxy buffering is enabled by default in Anypoint Dedicated Load Balancers. This feature stores
  the response from a server in internal buffers as it comes in, and delays sending data to the
  client until the entire response is buffered. Proxy buffering helps optimizing performance with
  slow clients, as it allows the proxied server to return its response quickly and serve other
  requests. However, it is not ideal for small payload streaming, as the buffer bucket can take
  longer to fill in. To avoid performance problems in small payload streaming, disable proxy
  buffering by passing `no` in the `X-Accel-Buffering` response header field.

> [!NOTE] For DLBs created before October 2021, click **Update** to enable the feature. After
> clicking **Update**, the DLB uses the static IP model described earlier, and you cannot revert to
> the former model.

For information about updating DLBs, see [Dedicated Load Balancer Updates](https://docs.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/lb-updates).

## See Also

- [Configure SSL Endpoints and Certificates](https://docs.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/lb-ssl-endpoints)

- [Anypoint VPC](https://docs.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/virtual-private-cloud)

- [Mapping Rules](https://docs.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/lb-mapping-rules)

- [Allowlists](https://docs.mulesoft.com/cloudhub/lb-allowlists)
