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Working with pools

Working with pools

The IBM Cloud® Network Load Balancer for VPC (NLB) pool is a group of back-end targets that receive the inbound customer traffic from the load balancer and provide your outbound traffic response. The pool has a protocol, a load-balancing algorithm, the back-end targets (VPC instances), the health checks for the back-end targets, and the session stickiness.

You can configure pools when creating a network load balancer, or later with the following procedure:

  1. From your browser, open the IBM Cloud console and log in to your account.

  2. Select the Navigation Menu Navigation Menu icon, then click Infrastructure > Network > Load balancers.

  3. Click the network load balancer that you want to change.

  4. On the network load balancer's details page, click the back-end pools tab and select the pool that you want to edit.

  5. Select the options for your pool:

    • Pool Name: The name for your pool. Ideally, a name that describes the function that is performed by this pool.
    • Protocol: The network traffic protocol for your traffic.
    • Method: The load-balancing algorithm for the pool.
    • Session stickiness: Whether all requests during a user's session are sent to the same instance.
    • Health check: For information about configuring health checks, see Working with health checks.
  6. You can add a backup pool to any existing pool by selecting failsafe policy with following menu options:

  • Action: The action to perform if primary pool is unhealthy. One of: forward or fail
  • Target: The selection of the backup pool is done here.