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Once you’ve set up an AWS ALB, you can access its advanced configuration settings within the AWS Management Console. After going to the Load Balancer section on the EC2 home page, you can create and modify load balancers as needed. It’s easy to configure, making it a popular choice among AWS engineers who are familiar with its capabilities. If your environment consists of clearly defined services mapped to specific addresses, then the limefx official site Classic ELB is the logical choice. A fundamental difference between AWS ELB and ALB is how they handle and route requests, which is best understood through the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model.
NLB can be created in only one availability zone, whereas with ALB, a minimum of two availability zones must be enabled to create a load balancer. Ultimately, your architectural requirements should guide your decision. For applications demanding maximum throughput and consistent performance, NLB may be your best choice.
The above example visualizes one ALB with three target groups attached, where each group represents a specific target type, such as EC2 instances, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. When implementing failover between NLB and ALB, understand their fundamental differences in handling connections. NLB preserves client IP addresses while ALB doesn’t by default – this can break applications if not properly accounted for in your DR planning. Create CloudWatch dashboards that show your load balancer health at a glance, and set up alarms for critical thresholds. The difference between a minor hiccup and a major outage often comes down to how quickly you spot problems.
Application load balancer (ALB), network load balancer (NLB), and gateway load balancer (GLB) are three types of load balancers used in the cloud. Load balancing is the process of distributing network traffic equally across a pool of resources supporting an application. Modern applications process millions of users simultaneously.
However, a GLB doesn’t act as a proxy or terminate the connection; it forwards traffic directly. Discussing AI software development, and showing off https://limefx.vip/ what we’re building. Whether you are a technologist or a management guru, you will find something very interesting.
But, if you’re working with microservices and containerized applications or need advanced routing capabilities, ALB is the better option. With content-based routing, multiple target groups, and deeper AWS service integration, ALB offers greater flexibility and scalability for modern cloud-native environments. A GLB is ideal when you’re balancing on the network gateway level. For example, a GLB works well if you manage traffic between cloud and on-premises environments or across different regions.
You can create your own rules or use AWS managed rules, such as IP reputation list rules, known bad inputs rules, and more. This will help you understand the supported functionalities common to both load balancers. An NLB is best for high-performance, low-latency, and scalable network-level balancing. Applications that distribute traffic on the transport layer use NLBs, especially considering its reliability. Gaming systems, media streaming services, and major IoT systems use NLBs. So when it comes to comparing performance metrics, NLB has the upper hand!
Its features—such SSL termination, session persistence, and content-based routing—enable it to offer assistance with complex routing scenarios. The ALB has a listener component that checks for connection requests from clients. You can define rules for a listener that determine how the load balancer routes requests to its registered targets.
It can peek inside HTTP requests and route traffic based on paths, headers, or query strings – perfect for microservices architectures. Certain application architectures may require zonal isolation. For example, single-AZ web applications may need traffic to be distributed only within a specific availability zone to minimize latency and avoid data transfer costs.
If you have an existing application that was built within the EC2-Classic network, then you should use a Classic Load Balancer. Modern web apps need real-time communication, and ALB delivers with full WebSocket support. Your chat applications, live dashboards, and gaming platforms can maintain persistent connections without the headaches. NLB can process millions of requests per second with ultra-low latency (often just microseconds). It maintains a direct connection between client and server using the same connection for the duration of a session.
A GLB uses routing table look-ups to determine where to route the traffic. When choosing between Network Load Balancer (NLB) and Application Load Balancer (ALB) on AWS, the stakes are higher than most realize. One handles millions of requests per second at ultra-low latency, while the other inspects application-layer traffic with sophisticated routing rules.
The only similarity is when using HTTPS (ALB) and TLS (NLB), where both load balancers support encrypted traffic and TLS termination at the load balancer level. However, NLB additionally supports routing traffic to another ALB. Why would I use an additional load balancer and increase the overall cost?
The default load balancing algorithm used for ALB is round-robin. This algorithm routes traffic evenly across all healthy targets and is most commonly used when requests are similar in complexity. To enable session persistence for an NLB, you need to update the target group and enable the stickiness setting. The Network Load Balancer uses the client’s IP address to consistently route traffic to a specific target instance. Be aware that if multiple clients “sit” behind the same router or NAT gateway and share a single public IP address, traffic may not be distributed evenly.
The AWS Application Load Balancer operates at the Application Layer (Layer 7) of the OSI model. It is designed to handle HTTP and HTTPS traffic, making it ideal for web applications. Remember that every single-point-of-failure in your architecture is a ticking time bomb. Your load balancer setup should survive an entire AZ going dark without customer impact.
Both load balancers support security groups, which you can use to control the traffic allowed to reach your targets (such as EC2 instances, IP addresses, etc.). For example, you can configure the traffic to be received only from specific IP addresses, enabling you to control who can access your internet-facing or internal load balancers. These load balancers use different types of algorithms to distribute traffic evenly to their targets. An ALB uses a round-robin algorithm by default, routing traffic one after another. However, an NLB uses a flow hash algorithm so that traffic is routed to specific targets in a predetermined manner.
When you create an ALB, you must specify in which availability zones (one subnet per availability zone) you will “enable” it. This means that the ALB will only be able to distribute traffic to the enabled availability zones. ALBs, NLBs, and GLBs operate at different layers of your network communication. An ALB operates on OSI layer 7 and allows for application-level traffic manipulation and routing. An NLB operates on layer 4 for network-level traffic management based on ports and IP addresses. A GLB works across layers 3 and 7, providing balancing and routing services at the network level along with gateway functionality.
NLBs are optimized for handling millions of requests per second, operating at Layer 4 (Transport Layer). This means they’re all about TCP, UDP, and TLS traffic, ideal for applications requiring quick response times. NLB is the speed demon, maintaining ultra-low latency even as connections multiply. If your future includes high-throughput streaming or real-time applications, NLB won’t become your bottleneck.
