An apparatus includes a virtual machine (VM) that is accessible via a cloud service. The VM has a virtual switch via which data is routed to and from the VM. The virtual switch is configured to: access an express route flow table which indicates whether a particular front end computing device has previously received a first data packet from the VM, and determine, based on the express route flow table, whether to encapsulate a second data packet from the VM destined for the particular front end computing device for an express route so as to bypass a load balancer of the cloud service.