# Load Balancer 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 [DigitalOcean API](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/index.html.md) lets you manage resources programmatically with standard HTTP requests. All actions available in the control panel are also available through the API.

You can use the API to [create, delete, and manage load balancers](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/digitalocean/index.html.md#tag/Load-Balancers).

[`doctl`](https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl) is the command-line interface for the DigitalOcean API. It supports most of the same actions available in the API and DigitalOcean Control Panel.

[`doctl`](https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl) supports managing load balancers from the command line. See the [`doctl` documentation](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/doctl/reference/compute/load-balancer/index.html.md) or use `doctl compute load-balancer --help` for more information.

The [DigitalOcean Model Context Protocol (MCP) server](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/mcp/index.html.md) lets you use natural language prompts to interact with DigitalOcean Networking services to manage resources. All operations use argument-based input, and no resource URIs are used. These tools enable full automation and management of networking resources and configurations.