Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing

A load balancer serves as the single point of contact for clients. The load balancer distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, in multiple Availability Zones. This increases the availability of your application. You add one or more listeners to your load balancer.

Application Load Balancer overview

An Application Load Balancer functions at the application layer, the seventh layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. After the load balancer receives a request, it evaluates the listener rules in priority order to determine which rule to apply, and then selects a target from the target group for the rule action. You can configure listener rules to route requests to different target groups based on the content of the application traffic. Routing is performed independently for each target group, even when a target is registered with multiple target groups. You can configure the routing algorithm used at the target group level. The default routing algorithm is round robin; alternatively, you can specify the least outstanding requests routing algorithm.

You can add and remove targets from your load balancer as your needs change, without disrupting the overall flow of requests to your application. Elastic Load Balancing scales your load balancer as traffic to your application changes over time. Elastic Load Balancing can scale to the vast majority of workloads automatically.

You can configure health checks, which are used to monitor the health of the registered targets so that the load balancer can send requests only to the healthy targets.

 

Benefits of migrating from a Classic Load Balancer

Using an Application Load Balancer instead of a Classic Load Balancer has the following benefits:

• Support for Path conditions. You can configure rules for your listener that forward requests based on the URL in the request. This enables you to structure your application as smaller services, and route requests to the correct service based on the content of the URL.

• Support for Host conditions. You can configure rules for your listener that forward requests based on the host field in the HTTP header. This enables you to route requests to multiple domains using a single load balancer.

• Support for routing based on fields in the request, such as HTTP header conditions and methods, query parameters, and source IP addresses.

• Support for routing requests to multiple applications on a single EC2 instance. You can register an instance or IP address with multiple target groups, each on a different port.

• Support for redirecting requests from one URL to another.

• Support for returning a custom HTTP response.

• Support for registering targets by IP address, including targets outside the VPC for the load balancer.

• Support for registering Lambda functions as targets.

• Support for the load balancer to authenticate users of your applications through their corporate or social identities before routing requests.

• Support for containerized applications. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) can select an unused port when scheduling a task and register the task with a target group using this port. This enables you to make efficient use of your clusters.

• Support for monitoring the health of each service independently, as health checks are defined at the target group level and many CloudWatch metrics are reported at the target group level. Attaching a target group to an Auto Scaling group enables you to scale each service dynamically based on demand.

• Access logs contain additional information and are stored in compressed format.

• Improved load balancer performance.