How does Windows Azure perform load balancing?

Question

I was trying to read up on load balancing in Windows Azure, and all the information about it is extremely vague and non-specific. All I really want is a simple answer: how does

Answer 1

While the load balancing used to be round robin, Microsoft have since changed the way they do the load balancing as described in this blog:

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/04/08/microsoft-azure-load-balancing-services/

The Microsoft Azure Load Balancer uses a 5 tuple (source IP, source port, destination IP, destination port, protocol type) to calculate the hash that is used to map traffic to the available servers