---
name: loadbalancer-service-getting-started
title: Getting started with IBM Cloud Load Balancer
description: The IBM Cloud® Load Balancer service helps customers improve availability of their business-critical applications by distributing traffic among multiple application server instances, and by forwarding traffic to healthy instances only.
last-updated: 2020-08-13
---

> ## Documentation Index
> The table of contents for this documentation set is at https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/loadbalancer-service?format=markdown
> The index for all IBM Cloud docs is at: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use these files to discover more information as needed.

# Getting started with IBM Cloud Load Balancer 
{: #getting-started}

The IBM Cloud® Load Balancer service helps customers improve availability of their business-critical applications by distributing traffic among multiple application server instances, and by forwarding traffic to healthy instances only. 
{: shortdesc}

To use IBM Cloud® Load Balancer, you require two main items: 

* An account with IBM - [IBMid](https://www.ibm.com/account/us-en/signup/register.html){: external}
* An IBM server, either [Bare Metal](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/bare-metal?topic=bare-metal-getting-started&format=markdown) or [Virtual Server Instance (VSI)](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/virtual-servers?topic=virtual-servers-getting-started-tutorial&format=markdown)

If you need assistance in obtaining an **IBMid** account, contact your IBM Sales representative for extra guidance.

## Ordering a load balancer
{: #ordering-a-load-balancer}

To get started with IBM Cloud® Load Balancer, see [Using an elastic load balancer for server load-balancing overview](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/loadbalancer-service?topic=loadbalancer-service-creating-and-using-an-ibm-cloud-load-balancer-for-elastic-server-load-balancing&format=markdown).