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 , 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.