Load Balancing Settings
This reference covers all of Pomerium's Load Balancing Settings:
Load Balancing Policy
Load Balancing Policy defines the load balancing strategy between multiple upstream servers.
See Envoy documentation for more details.
How to configure
Some policy types support additional configuration.
- Core
- Enterprise
- Kubernetes
| Config file keys | Type | Usage | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
lb_policy | enum | optional | ROUND_ROBIN |
Examples
routes:
- from: https://myapp.localhost.pomerium.io
to:
- http://myapp-srv-1:8080
- http://myapp-srv-2:8080
- http://myapp-srv-3:8080
- http://myapp-srv-4:8080
- http://myapp-srv-5:8080
lb_policy: LEAST_REQUEST
least_request_lb_config:
choice_count: 2 # current envoy default
Set the Load Balancing Policy in the Console:

| Annotation name | Type | Usage | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
lb_policy | enum | optional | ROUND_ROBIN |
Examples
ingress.pomerium.io/lb_policy: LEAST_REQUEST
ingress.pomerium.io/least_request_lb_config: '{"choice_count": 2}'
Load Balancing Policy options
| Load Balancer Policy options |
|---|
ROUND_ROBIN |
RING_HASH (may be further configured using ring_hash_lb_config option) |
LEAST_REQUEST (may be further configured using least_request_lb_config) |
RANDOM |
MAGLEV (may be further configured using maglev_lb_config option) |
Health Checks
When defined, Health Checks will issue periodic health check requests to upstream servers and unhealthy upstream servers won't serve traffic.
See Envoy's outlier_detection for automatic upstream server health detection. In the presence of multiple upstream servers, it is recommended to set up either health_checks, outlier_detection, or both.
See the Envoy documentation for a list of supported parameters.
How to configure
Only one of http_health_check, tcp_health_check, or grpc_health_check may be configured per health_check object definition.
See Load Balancing for example configurations.
- Core
- Enterprise
- Kubernetes
| Config file keys | Type | Usage |
|---|---|---|
health_checks | array of objects | optional |
Configure Health Checks under Load Balancing settings in the Console:

See Kubernetes Ingress - load balancing for more information.