Load Balancing on a Public or Private Network

A load balancer can work on either a public or private network.

Load Balancing on a Public Network

You can bind an EIP to a load balancer so that it can receive requests from the Internet and route the requests to backend servers.

Figure 1 Load balancing on a public network

Load Balancing on a Private Network

A load balancer has only a private IP address to receive requests from clients in a VPC and routes the requests to backend servers in the same VPC. This type of load balancer can only be accessed in a VPC.

Figure 2 Load balancing on a private network

Network Types and Load Balancers

**Table 1** Dedicated load balancers and their network types
Load Balancer Type	Network Type	Description
Dedicated load balancers	Public IPv4 network	Each load balancer has an IPv4 EIP bound to enable it to route requests over the Internet.
	Private IPv4 network	Each load balancer has only a private IPv4 address and can route requests in a VPC.
	IPv6 network	Each load balancer has an IPv6 address bound. If the IPv6 address is added to a shared bandwidth, the load balancer can route requests over the Internet. If the IPv6 address is not added to a shared bandwidth, the load balancer can route requests only in a VPC.

**Table 2** Shared load balancers and their network types
Load Balancer Type	Network Type	Description
Shared load balancers	Public IPv4 network	Each load balancer has an EIP bound to enable it to route requests over the Internet.
Shared load balancers	Private IPv4 network	Each load balancer has only a private IP address and can route requests in a VPC. NOTE: Shared load balancers support private IPv4 networks by default. The private IP address of a shared load balancer cannot be changed.