# Load Balancers API Reference

DigitalOcean fully manages Regional Load Balancers and Global Load Balancers, ensuring they are highly available load balancing services. Load balancers distribute traffic to groups of backend resources in specific regions or across different regions, which prevents the health of a service from depending on the health of a single server, cluster, or region.

The Load Balancers API endpoints are organized into the following groups:

- [**Load Balancers**](load-balancers/) (10 endpoints): DigitalOcean Load Balancers provide a way to distribute traffic across multiple Droplets. By sending requests to the `/v2/load_balancers` endpoint, you can list, create, or delete load balancers as well as add or remove Droplets, forwarding rules, and other configuration details.
- [**Certificates**](certificates/) (4 endpoints): In order to perform SSL termination on load balancers, DigitalOcean offers two types of SSL certificate management:

  - **Custom**: User-generated certificates may be uploaded to DigitalOcean where they will be placed in a fully encrypted and isolated storage system.
  - **Let’s Encrypt**: Certificates may be automatically generated by DigitalOcean utilizing an integration with Let’s Encrypt, the free and open certificate authority. These certificates will also be automatically renewed as required.