Scale confidently with upgraded Load Balancers

One of the critical components that’s required to deliver superior customer experiences is a reliable load balancer. Load balancers distribute traffic across your infrastructure and enable you to improve and manage availability, performance, and reliability. 

DigitalOcean customers are no different, and many of them rely on our managed Load Balancer service to run and scale their apps. We are excited to announce that we have made major upgrades to our Load Balancer! With this release, DigitalOcean Load Balancer can easily handle up to one million requests per second or one million simultaneous connections.

This upgrade gives DigitalOcean customers more flexibility in choosing the right sized Load Balancer for your apps.

You determine how much traffic your Load Balancer can handle by picking the appropriate number of nodes. You can start with 1 node and scale up to 100 nodes. Each node increases the capacity of the load balancer as follows:

• 10,000 Request Per Second or RPS 
• 10,000 Simultaneous connections
• 250 New SSL connections per second 

We understand that traffic to your apps can go up or down, with some apps, such as an ecommerce app during the holidays, experiencing significant surges. With this in mind, we have designed the load balancer so that you can quickly resize it to meet your needs. You can increase the capacity of your Load Balancer by adding more nodes or decrease its capacity by removing nodes. Here’s a short video that shows how easy it is to spin up the new Load Balancers.

Beyond the flexibility of choosing the right size for your Load Balancer, we are keeping many of the features we had in place, including our easy integration with Let’s Encrypt, which lets you create SSL certificates for free, and we make sure they get renewed automatically. We recently enabled the option to create wildcard certificates, so you can have any subdomain automatically covered! You can read more about configuring SSL termination in the official documentation.

You can use Load Balancers with Droplets (Linux-based virtual machines) as well as DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes. 

Pricing

The pricing for Load Balancers is based on its size, and is determined by the number of nodes you assign to it. Each node costs $12 per month (pricing as of July 1, 2022). For example, if you create a Load Balancer with five nodes, then your monthly price will be $60. The price of the Load Balancer is not affected by the number of targets (e.g. Droplets, DigitalOcean Kubernetes nodes) it has.

DigitalOcean Load Balancers by themselves don’t generate bandwidth charges, as they are bandwidth neutral. Click here to learn more.

The upgraded Load Balancers are available starting today across all regions, except AMS2, NYC2, SFO1. Existing Load Balancers will be converted into the new version with no loss in features or performance and keeping the same price.

We hope that you are excited about this release and will give the upgraded Load Balancers a try. Check out the docs for more information. If you would like to have a conversation about using the upgraded Load Balancers for your business or if you need a Load Balancer with over 100 nodes, then please contact our sales team.

Lastly, we have deploy, DigitalOcean’s signature user conference next week, which focuses on celebrating, educating, and connecting awesome builders from all over the world. Make sure to join us to learn more exciting news from your favorite builders.

Happy coding,

Rafael Rosa

Lead Product Manager @ Digitalocean