Network load balancer types

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Updated at September 10, 2025

Note

You can only set the load balancer type (internal or external) when creating it and cannot change it later.

Here are the options for deploying a network load balancer in Yandex Cloud:

External load balancer (EXTERNAL), which is created by default. It is used to handle Internet traffic.
Internal load balancer (INTERNAL), which is used to handle internal Virtual Private Cloud traffic.

These load balancers operate similarly, but you should keep the following distinctions in mind:

Load balancer property	External	Internal
Listener IP address	Public IP addresses only	IP addresses from RFC-1918 only
Blocking the listener target port for traffic on target VMs	Active (*)	Blocked
Blocking the listener target port for health checks on target VMs	Active	Blocked
Locality in traffic processing	-	Considerations apply
Use of static routes	-	Considerations apply

Explanation of the table:

The VM ports (Target-Port) used to receive traffic from the internal load balancer and health checks become unavailable for connecting.
The VMs will only receive traffic from the internal load balancer. The same restriction will not allow a VM from the load balancer's target group to access it through the port being used.
(*) A VM from the load balancer's target group cannot access itself through the target port.

Use cases