Provisioning a Load Balancer

1. Start Locally

Firstly, we need to launch Locally which we can do from a terminal by running:

Once Locally has started, the Locally Dashboard will open automatically:

2. Create a Resource Group

Next we can create the Resource Group:

There's two things to note here:

1. The Azure CLI supports Automatic Configuration, meaning that it can automatically be configured to work against Locally just by prefixing commands with locally run.
2. Locally intentionally uses a different set of locations to Azure as a safety precaution, so that you can be confident you're deploying against Locally rather than regular Azure. You can also configure Locally to use the Azure locations too, but you'll want to be extra sure that you're prefixing commands with locally run when you do.

3. Create a Public IP Address and the Load Balancer

A load balancer needs somewhere to receive traffic, so we'll create a Public IP Address for its frontend first:

Then the load balancer itself, wiring that address to a frontend configuration and creating an empty backend pool:

We can read it back to see what was created:

{
  "backend": [
    "backend"
  ],
  "frontend": [
    "frontend"
  ],
  "name": "sample-lb",
  "sku": "Standard"
}

4. Add a health probe and rule

A load balancer with no health probe has no way of knowing whether a backend is healthy, so that's next:

{
  "name": "health",
  "port": 80,
  "protocol": "Tcp"
}

Then a rule tying the frontend, the backend pool and the probe together - this is what actually forwards traffic:

{
  "backendPort": 80,
  "frontendPort": 80,
  "name": "http",
  "protocol": "Tcp"
}

We can see the Load Balancer in the Locally Dashboard too:

5. Tidy up

Finally, we can tidy up. To remove the Resource Group and everything within it:

There's nothing billable to clean up, since everything ran on your machine, but it's still worth checking your teardown scripts work here before you run them against Azure.

Doing this with other tooling

Whilst this guide used the Azure CLI, Load Balancers work the same way through any of the tooling that Locally supports - a Microsoft.Network/loadBalancers resource in HashiCorp Terraform or OpenTofu, Pulumi, Bicep or an ARM Template all provision against Locally in the same way, with only the location changed.

Next steps

For outbound traffic from a subnet, see NAT Gateway.

Should you encounter any issues, please take a look at the troubleshooting section.