AWS Load Balancer
AWS Load Balancer is a fully managed service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. This helps to improve the performance, availability, and scalability of our applications.
Key benefits of using AWS Load Balancer:
- Improved performance: By distributing traffic across multiple targets, AWS Load Balancer can help to reduce latency and improve response times.
- Increased availability: AWS Load Balancer can help to ensure that our applications remain available even if individual targets fail.
- Enhanced scalability: AWS Load Balancer can automatically scale up or down to meet changing traffic demands.
- Simplified management: AWS Load Balancer is a managed service, so we don’t have to worry about managing and maintaining the underlying infrastructure.
Types of AWS Load Balancers:
- Application Load Balancer (ALB): Routes traffic based on application-level information, such as the URL path or HTTP headers.
- Network Load Balancer (NLB): Routes traffic based on IP addresses and ports.
- Gateway Load Balancer (GLB): Routes traffic to third-party virtual appliances, such as network firewalls.
- Classic Load Balancer: A legacy load balancer that is still supported but is not recommended for new applications.
Use cases for AWS Load Balancer:
- Web applications: Distribute traffic across multiple web servers to improve performance and availability.
- API gateways: Route traffic to different backend services based on the API endpoint.
- Microservices architectures: Distribute traffic across multiple microservices to improve scalability and resilience.
- Gaming servers: Distribute traffic across multiple game servers to improve performance and reduce latency.
Distributing technique of AWS Load Balancer:
- Round Robin: This is the simplest method, where traffic is distributed to each target in a round-robin fashion.
- Least Connections: Traffic is sent to the target with the fewest active connections.
- Least Time: Traffic is sent to the target with the shortest average response time.
- Availability Zone: Traffic is distributed across multiple Availability Zones to improve fault tolerance and availability.
- Custom Health Checks: Load Balancer can perform custom health checks on targets to determine their health status. This allows you to define specific criteria for a target to be considered healthy.
- Weighted Round Robin: You can assign weights to targets to influence how much traffic they receive. This can be useful for balancing traffic between targets with different capacities or performance characteristics.
- Sticky Sessions: This technique allows you to ensure that requests from the same client are always sent to the same target. This can be useful for applications that require stateful sessions.
By using AWS Load Balancer, we can improve the performance, availability, and scalability of our applications while reducing the complexity of our infrastructure.