AWS Load Balancers
Published: 2023-02-17 10:31:28

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing service that provides a wide range of services and tools for businesses of all sizes. One of the key features of AWS is its load balancing services, which help distribute traffic across multiple servers and improve application performance and availability. In this blog post, we will discuss the different load balancing services offered by AWS and their features.

What is a Load Balancer?

A load balancer is a service that helps distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers or instances. By doing so, load balancers help optimize the performance and availability of web applications. Load balancing works by distributing incoming traffic across different servers based on a set of predefined rules. These rules can include factors such as server health, server capacity, and network latency.

AWS offers several load balancing services that help customers improve the performance, availability, and security of their applications. The following are the main load balancing services offered by AWS:

- Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
The Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is a managed load balancing service that automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. ELB is designed to handle both HTTP and HTTPS traffic and supports multiple protocols, including TCP and UDP.

ELB comes in three different types: Classic Load Balancer, Application Load Balancer, and Network Load Balancer.

- Classic Load Balancer: This is the original load balancer service offered by AWS. It is designed to work with both HTTP and HTTPS traffic and supports routing requests to multiple instances running in different availability zones.
Application Load Balancer: This load balancer is designed for routing HTTP/HTTPS traffic and is best suited for microservices and container-based architectures. Application Load Balancer supports advanced features like path-based routing, host-based routing, and routing based on HTTP headers and methods.
Network Load Balancer: This load balancer is designed for handling high-volume, low-latency traffic. Network Load Balancer operates at the network layer (Layer 4) and can handle millions of requests per second. It supports routing traffic based on IP protocol data and can be used to handle TCP, UDP, and TLS traffic.
Global Accelerator
Global Accelerator is a service that enables customers to improve the availability and performance of their applications by routing traffic over the AWS global network. Global Accelerator works by creating static IP addresses that are associated with customer applications. These IP addresses are announced to the internet through the AWS global network, and incoming traffic is routed to the nearest available endpoint.

Global Accelerator supports TCP and UDP protocols and can be used with any application running on EC2 instances, Application Load Balancers, or Network Load Balancers. It also provides intelligent routing based on network health and can automatically route traffic around network congestion and outages.

- Application Gateway
Application Gateway is a managed service that provides customers with advanced load balancing capabilities for web applications. Application Gateway is designed to work with web applications running on Azure, AWS, and other cloud platforms. It supports routing traffic based on URL path, host header, and SSL/TLS offloading.

Application Gateway also provides advanced security features like web application firewall (WAF), which helps protect web applications from common web attacks. WAF includes a set of pre-configured rules that can be customized to meet specific application requirements.

- Network Load Balancer for TCP/UDP traffic
AWS Network Load Balancer provides high throughput and low latency for traffic generated by network devices such as switches, routers, and firewalls. It supports transport layer protocols such as TCP, UDP and TLS. Network Load Balancer supports static and elastic IP addresses, SSL/TLS termination and multiple ports.

Conclusion

Load balancing is a critical component of any application architecture, and AWS offers a wide range of load balancers.