A load balancer distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, in multiple Availability Zones to increase the availability of your application. A load balancer works with listeners. You can have more than one listener per load balancer.
A listener checks for connection requests from clients, using the protocol and port that you configure. The load balancer forwards requests to one or more target groups, based on the rules that you define.
Each rule specifies a target group, condition, and priority. The traffic is forwarded to that group when the condition is met. You define a default rule for each listener. You can add rules that specify different target groups based on the content of the request. Each target group routes requests to one or more registered targets, for example EC2 instances, using the specified protocol and port number. You can register a target with multiple target groups.
Elastic Load Balancing
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is one of the most widely used AWS services. It has been adopted by organizations of all sizes, in all geographies, and across every industry. ELBs automatically distribute traffic across multiple targets, provide high availability, incorporate security features, and perform health checks.
ELB features
ELB load balancers are the only load balancers available on AWS that natively connect users to your EC2 instances, container deployments, and AWS Lambda functions. Some key feature sets include the following:
- High availability – ELB automatically distributes your traffic across multiple targets in a single Availability Zone or multiple Availability Zones. Examples of targets include EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses.
- Layer 4 or Layer 7 HTTP and HTTPS load balancing – You can load balance your HTTP or HTTPS applications for Layer 7-specific features. Alternatively, you can use strict Layer 4 load balancing for applications that rely purely on the TCP.
- Security features – Use Amazon VPC to create and manage security groups associated with load balancers to provide additional networking and security options. You can also create an internal (non-internet-facing) load balancer.
- Health checks – ELB load balancers can detect unhealthy targets, stop sending traffic to them, and spread the load across the remaining healthy targets.
- Monitoring operations – To monitor the performance of your applications in real time, ELB integrates with CloudWatch metrics and provides request tracing.
Types of load balancers
Application Load Balancer
This load balancer functions at the application layer, the seventh layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. Application Load Balancers support the following: Content-based routing, applications that run in containers, and open standard protocols (WebSocket and HTTP/2). This type of balancer is ideal for advanced load balancing of HTTP and HTTPS traffic.
Network Load Balancer
This load balancer is designed to handle tens of millions of requests per second while maintaining high throughput at ultra low-latency. Network Load Balancer operates at the connection level (Layer 4), routing connections to targets based on IP protocol data. Targets include EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. It is ideal for balancing TCP traffic.
Gateway Load Balancer
This load balancer makes it easy to deploy, scale, and manage your third-party virtual appliances. It provides one gateway for distributing traffic across multiple virtual appliances, and scales them up, or down, based on demand. This distribution reduces potential points of failure in your network and increases availability. Gateway Load Balancer transparently passes all Layer 3 traffic through third-party virtual appliances. It is invisible to the source and destination.
Classic Load Balancer
ELB common features
| Features | Application Load Balancer | Network Load Balancer | Gateway Load Balancer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Health checks | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| CloudWatch metrics | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Logging | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) offloading | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Connection draining | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Preserve source IP address | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Static IP address | ** | ✔ | |
| Lambda functions as a target | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Redirects | ✔ | ||
| Fixed-response actions | ✔ |
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Osama
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