Release notes for IBM Cloud Load Balancer

Find out about new and updated features in IBM Cloud® Load Balancer.

15 April 2020

Public subnet selection for public-to-private load balancers: You can now choose a public subnet while creating a public-to-private load balancer if nonsystem pool is also selected. This is supported for creation of load balancers by using APIs only.
IBM Cloud Monitoring monitoring metrics: You can now access load balancer monitoring metrics (throughput, active connections, connection rate) by using IBM Cloud Monitoring.

11 March 2020

Support redirection from HTTP to HTTPS: IBM Cloud® Load Balancer now allows you to configure a Level 7 policy by using the action REDIRECT_HTTPS. This action redirects HTTP traffic to the HTTPS listener port. You don't need a rule configuration for this action, and only one configuration is supported per listener. You can configure this action through API only.; For more information, see Layer 7 policy.
Allow customers to configure load-balancer timeout values: IBM Cloud® Load Balancer now allows you to configure or modify client and server timeout values by using the API. This feature is intended for applications that need customized timeout values.

22 September 2019

Support for X-Forwarded-Proto Header: IBM Cloud® Load Balancer now inserts the X-Forwarded-Proto header for all requests when the front-end protocol is HTTP or HTTPS. This helps the back-end servers to know the protocol that is used by the client to connect to the load balancer.
HTTP cookie session persistence: IBM Cloud® Load Balancer now supports a new session persistence type called HTTP Cookie. With this type of session persistence, the load balancer adds a cookie to the first response from the back-end server. Subsequent HTTP requests with the cookie arriving at the load balancer are now persistent on the same back-end server.

3 June 2019

Public-to-public load balancer: IBM Cloud® Load Balancer now supports a new load balancer type that is called a public-to-public load balancer. With this type of load balancer, you can add back-end server instances by using their public IPs, and traffic is forwarded to them through their public interface. This applies to both layer 4 and layer 7 back-end members.

21 April 2019

Layer 7 support: IBM Cloud® Load Balancer now fully supports layer 7 load balancing with APIs and the user portal. Through our layer 7 support, you can now group VSI or Bare Metal server instances in server pools and handle incoming requests according to set rules and policies so that traffic can be redirected to a URL, rejected, or distributed to layer 7 pool members.

20 February 2019

Data logs: IBM Cloud® Load Balancer now supports data log forwarding. With data logs enabled. Your load balancer log data is forwarded to the IBM Cloud Log Analysis Service.

11 December 2018

Back-end encryption and data log forwarding: IBM Cloud® Load Balancer now supports back-end encryption and the ability to forward your data logs. Back-end encryption allows end-to-end data traffic encryption, including the traffic between the load balancer and the back-end servers. Data log forwarding lets you send data logs from your load balancers to the IBM Cloud Log Analysis Service.

04 August 2018

Layer 7 API support: IBM Cloud® Load Balancer now provides a set of APIs supporting layer 7 load balancing. With layer 7 support, traffic can be redirected to a URL, rejected, or distributed to Level-7 pool members, including bare-metal and virtual-server instances. Incoming data traffic is classified by using Layer 7 policies and rules. The policies define what action to take when the data traffic matches the rules that are associated with them.; For more information, see Layer 7 load balancing.

04 April 2018

Horizontal scaling

IBM Cloud® Load Balancer now scales up automatically when its load increases, and scales down as it decreases. When you create a load balancer, it starts with two appliances, but the number of appliances can be increased to 16 as the monitoring system detects an increase in the load. The IP addresses of each of the active appliances are added as DNS A-Records to the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the load balancer.

Internal load balancer

A highly demanded "internal" version of our IBM Cloud® Load Balancer is now available. This load balancer is not exposed publicly, but can still be used to balance applications within their IBM Cloud private networks (in a multi-tiered deployment, for instance, as shown in the figure).

It is both secure and consistent with the previous versions of IBM Cloud® Load Balancer on the public side.

Monitoring metrics

You can now use the "IBM Cloud Monitoring" service to monitor the following performance metrics that are associated with your load balancer and application:

Throughput
Connection rate
Active connections

Up to two weeks of samples are collected and displayed by the load balancer web UI. The data can also be viewed on the IBM Cloud Monitoring service portal. If you require data for longer than two weeks, depending on the volume of other cloud metrics you might be sending to your Cloud Monitoring instance, you might need to upgrade your monitoring plan. For more information, see Monitoring metrics by using IBM Cloud Monitoring.

Cipher suite customization

You can now customize the cipher suites that are used when the load balancer is configured for SSL termination.

When you enable SSL termination on IBM Cloud® Load Balancer (by selecting HTTPS as the front-end protocol), a carefully selected default set of cipher suites is enabled that conform to security best practices. IBM keeps a close watch on any new vulnerabilities that might be discovered, and updates the list. This, along with the seamless security updates of software and hardware components, helps to keep your applications secure always.

For more information, see Custom cipher suite.