Elb
A service to distribute load (ex. incoming requests) evenly across available instances
- enables all available instances are utilized equally
- decides which incoming request should be forwarded to which instance
- don’t have a fixed IP (they use domain names like
my-elb-1234.amazonaws.com)- consists of multiple services
Main load balancers
- diagram
Application Load Balancer
- More feature rich (ALB allows more advanced request routing)
- limited to HTTP(S) traffic
- Broad variety of request forwarding conditions & rules
- Can inspect incoming HTTP requests and route based on URL, headers, cookies, etc
- capable of SSL termination
- can act as an endpoint for incoming HTTPS requests
- it can decrypt those requests and forward the un-encrypted requests to your application running on an EC2 instance
- Good for web applications, APIs, microservices.
Network Load Balancer
- leaner (faster and better for high-performance workloads)
- get a fixed IP address by AWS
- perfect for non-http requests
- Good for gaming servers, databases, VoIP, and other high-speed network applications