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Creating Application Load Balancer infrastructure through a wizard

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Updated at April 22, 2025

Yandex Application Load Balancer enables distributing requests across backends of your network applications and terminating TLS encryption. Application Load Balancer runs at Layer 7 of the OSI model using HTTP and HTTPS.

This guide will help you deploy the Application Load Balancer infrastructure and set up traffic to the test application backend.

Below, you can see how to create an infrastructure using a wizard. You can also create all components one by one.

Getting started

  1. Log in or sign up to the management console. If not signed up yet, navigate to the management console and follow the on-screen instructions.
  2. On the Yandex Cloud Billing page, make sure you have a billing account linked and its status is ACTIVE or TRIAL_ACTIVE. If you do not have a billing account yet, create one.
  3. If you do not have a folder yet, create one. While creating a folder, you can also create a default virtual network with subnets in all availability zones.

Create a VM and launch a test web server on it

  1. Create the test-vm1 VM from the Ubuntu 24.04 public image in the ru-central1-a availability zone.

  2. Connect to your VM over SSH.

    If you have the Yandex Cloud CLI installed, you can connect to your VM via OS Login:

    yc compute ssh --name test-vm1

  3. Start a test web server listening on port 8080:

    mkdir test-server; echo 'HELLO' > test-server/hello.txt; python3 -m http.server -d test-server 8080

  4. Make sure your web server returns a list of subdirectories in the test-server directory. Open the terminal on your computer and run this command:

    curl --verbose <VM_public_IP_address>:8080

Create Application Load Balancer infrastructure

  1. In the management console, select the folder where you want to create a load balancer.
  2. In the list of services, select Application Load Balancer.
  3. Click Create L7 load balancer and select Wizard.

Target group settings

Your application backends will be deployed on the VM instance of the target group. The target group will be connected to the load balancer so that requests might be sent to the backend endpoints of your application.

In this example, we will assume there is only one VM in the target group.

  1. Enter the target group name: test-target-group.
  2. Select the VM named test-vm1.
  3. Leave all other settings unchanged and click Create and continue.

Backend group settings

Backend groups contain settings for traffic balancing and target resource health check. The wizard automatically creates one backend and one health check group. It will also select the group you created at the previous step as target group.

  1. Enter the backend group name: test-backend-group.

  2. To open backend and health check group settings, toggle Advanced settings on.

  3. Enter the backend name: backend-1.

  4. Configure health check settings:

    1. Interval: 3.
    2. Healthy threshold: 2.

  5. Leave all other settings unchanged and click Create and continue.

HTTP router settings

HTTP routers define the rules for routing requests sent to backends and allow you to modify requests directly in the balancer. The wizard will automatically create a virtual host and routing rule. It will also select the group you created at the previous step as backend group.

  1. Enter the router name: test-http-router.
  2. Toggle Advanced settings on.
  3. Under Virtual hosts, enter:
    1. Host name: test-virtual-host.
    2. Route name: test-route.
  4. Leave all other settings unchanged and click Create and continue.

L7 load balancer settings

A load balancer receives requests and distributes them across target group VMs according to the rules specified in the HTTP router. Load balancers use listeners to receive traffic. The wizard will create a listener automatically. It will also select the router you created at the previous step as HTTP router.

As an example, let's create a balancer with a node in the same subnet and same availability zone.

  1. Enter the load balancer name: test-load-balancer.

  2. Under Network settings, select the network whose subnet will host the load balancer node.

  3. Toggle Advanced settings on.

  4. Under Allocation, select a subnet in one availability zone and enable incoming traffic in this subnet.

    Remove the other availability zones by clicking in the relevant row.

  5. Under Listeners, enter the listener name: test-listener.

  6. Leave all other settings unchanged and click Create.

Test the load balancer

In the terminal, run the following command:

curl --verbose <load_balancer_public_IP_address>:80

The response must return the HTTP status code 200 and an HTML list of folders from the test VM folder.

After that, you can add other VMs to the target group, create new backends for your application, and build routes to the application endpoints.

How to delete the resources you created

To stop paying for the resources you created, delete them in the following order:

  1. Delete the test-load-balancer L7 load balancer.
  2. Delete the test-http-router HTTP router.
  3. Delete the test-backend-group backend group.
  4. Delete the test-target-group target group.
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