Whenever we publish a blog or an article on a website it usually gets some traffic while the visitors visit. In case there is sensational news with an exclusive offer regarding anything within the article, then it goes viral. Also, it attracts a significant amount of traffic to the site due to which it becomes out of control and site crashes. As all this runs on a single EC2 instance, it is unable to handle the large traffic. At this time, a load balancer comes into the role. It balances the large traffic by distributing the web traffic into small micro instances. AWS load balancer allocates a huge amount of network traffic to different instance types like AWS Lambda, EC2, Containers, etc.
Before we go deep into this section, we should know what AWS load balancer actually is. So here is in brief about this load balancer.
What is an AWS load balancer?
Hence, load balancing is a technique to control the incoming network traffic coming from different sources, clients, and routing them. AWS load balancer accepts the incoming huge traffic from clients and allocates it to the registered destinations. These allocations are done to one or more than one availability zones. Also, the AWS load balancer observes the sound health of its registered destinations or targets. It only transfers or routes the traffic to the healthy targets only which can able to handle.
The Elastic Load Balancing in AWS provides the facility of balancing loads across AWS and on-premise resources through a single load balancer. This is in brief about what is AWS load balancer and its use. In this blog, you will explore the different types of AWS load balancer and their uses and benefits.
There are different types of load balancers available in AWS that serve different purposes. Also, there are different types of algorithms used in the AWS load balancer. Such as the Round-robin method, the Least response time method, IP hash, and the least connection method. Besides, these methods or algorithms can be applied to any use case that you deal with.
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Hence, the first algorithm round-robin method is a simple algorithm to allocate the client’s request to the server’s group. The least connection method directs the network traffic to the server when it is an uneven distribution of large traffic. Then the least response time takes the average time to direct a client’s request to the server. Also, the IP hash method uses the IP address of the client for this purpose.
Let’s get into the next section in AWS.
AWS load balancer types
There are different AWS load balancer types which are discussed in the following section. These are- Classic Load Balancer, Application Load Balancer, and Network Load Balancer. Let us discuss these AWS load balancer types in detail.
Classic Load Balancer
A Classic load balancer makes the decisions of routing network traffic either at the transport layer or at the application layer. It allocates the incoming traffic to various EC2 instance types across different Availability Zones. Besides, there is a chance of failure of the application during this process. Thus, this type of load balancer verifies the health of the instances and directs traffic to the healthy instance.
Moreover, it helps you in a great way whenever you need to make changes to the instances. Through the Classic AWS load balancer type, you can alter the instances by either add or remove. This change can be done from load balancers without disturbing the existing request flow towards the application.
Further, AWS Elastic Load Balancing can automatically calculate most of the workloads. The benefits of Classic load balancer is-
This AWS ELB supports the EC2-classic.
It also supports the TCP, SSL, HTTP, etc listeners.
Also, helps in performing health checks of the instances.
Distributes large traffic to the various instances for balancing the load.
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Application Load Balancer
After getting the requests from clients Application load balancer makes an analysis of rules given by the listener. This is given utmost priority and also determines the applicable rules thereafter. Further, it chooses a target from the group for applying the rule for action. Moreover, this load balancer functions at the OSI model of the application layer which is its 7th layer.
Here, a user can analyze and evaluate the listener rules and can alter them by sending them to the different target groups. This is purely based on the traffic size and content even the target is related to several target groups. Besides, there is a facility to add or remove the tags from the load balancers as per the requirement that it offers. Also, this is done without disrupting the workflow of application requests.
Moreover, similar to the earlier one, it allows users to check the health of its registered targets. And send the requests from clients to the healthier target only.
The following are the major benefits of Application Load Balancer within AWS Load balancer.
- It supports request redirection from one to another in a smooth way.
- The performance of the load balancers improves within the App load balancer.
- It also supports the routing of requests to various apps on a single EC2 instance type.
- Moreover, it supports load balancers in authenticating users of apps through their social or corporate identity before allocating requests.
- Also, it provides an advantage to the registering targets by IP address that includes the targets outside the VPC for the LB.
- Further, it offers support for container apps like Amazon ECS where it can choose an unused port while scheduling a task. Also, it can register the task through a target group using this port.
Network Load Balancer
A Network Load Balancer makes the allocations of requests at the transport layer. Also, this the 4th layer of the OSI model within the AWS load balancer types. When the LB gets a connection request it chooses a target from the group. This target is from the default rule only.
Then after authorizing the availability zone the ELB builds an LB node within the availability zone. Therefore, each LB node allocates the network traffic automatically across the registered destiny within its availability zone.
Moreover, authorizing too many availability zones(AZ) may harm apps’ enhancing fault tolerance. This particularly happens when each target group has at least a single target within the authorized AZ.
Hence, we can overcome this situation when one or more target groups don’t have healthy targets within the availability zone. Then we can remove the IP add from the corresponding DNS.
Thus, the following are the major benefits of NLB.:-
It offers support for the static IP Addresses for the LB.
The NLB has the ability to manage loads of requests and scale them within a short span.
Also, it provides support for the registering targets through an IP address that includes targets outside the VPC of the LBs.
Moreover, it supports the observation of the health of each service independently. It provides support for the distribution of app requests to different apps on a single EC2 instance.
This is all about the AWS Load balancer types but there is another LB that is- GLB
Gateway Load Balancer
The GLB allows users to deploy, scale, and manage virtual appliances like firewalls, security systems, breach detection, etc. It integrates the transparent network gateway and allocates traffic while scaling up virtual appliances(VA) on demand. This is the third most layer of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model. Hence, it listens for all the IP packets of all the ports and routes traffic to the destiny group. These target groups are specified in the listener rule.
Further, through the GENEVE protocol, the GLB and its registered VA exchange app traffic on a port given.
GLB uses some GLB endpoints to secure the traffic exchange across the VPC boundaries over the port. This traffic movement to and through the Gateway LB endpoints is configured through the route tables.
This is finally made the total list of AWS load balancer types which is explained in detail above. Let us move further in this context to know more about these LBs and their benefits.
Benefits of using AWS Load Balancer
There are many notable benefits of the AWS load balancer in driving the network traffic to targets. These major benefits of AWS ELB include-
The AWS LB is highly available and allocates the incoming web traffic across different target groups.
It offers high-level security to the traffic coming in through user authentication. Also, it uses SSL, TLS decryption process for this.
The great advantage of the AWS load balancer is that it can manage a large volume of network traffic without human touch. Thus, it is highly elastic in nature.
AWS load balancer also improves the visibility of user apps by regular monitoring and auditing. It simplifies inter-app communication through this within a microservice-based structure.
It also supports hybrid LB that helps while relocating resources to the cloud platform. Through this, it balances the heavy loads across the AWS and on-premise resources.
The AWS LB is highly flexible in routing requests to the application targets through IP addresses.
It contributes a great value to the application performance and the traffic distribution of the organizations’ network.
Hence, these are a few of the important benefits of the AWS Load Balancer.
How to develop a Load Balancer?
Here are a few steps using which a user can build a classic load balancer easily.
For this, it is needed to enable the EC2 instance and make sure the security groups have access to the HTTP 80 port. Then it needs to install the web server and the process starts.
First, select the type of load balancer that will be used from the Amazon EC2 console.
Then define the load balancer by providing a basic configuring to it.
Next, allot health checks and security groups to that LB.
Then register the EC2 instance with that Load Balancer.
Finally, build the LB and verify the same for further process.
In this way, you can develop a simple LB of any type mentioned above. I hope these sequences will help to build a basic LB easily.
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Why is load balancing much important?
This is most important in the current era because it not only offers high availability but also supports scalability. Cloud architecture is favored for its benefits of high scalability. This is possible by spinning up the various virtual servers running alongside the various app instances. LBs are responsible for the allocation of network traffic across the new instance types.
Also, they identify the unavailable servers and direct the traffic to healthy and available servers as well. Thus, we can say that load balancers add more value to the cloud computing infrastructure of any enterprise. So, the use of an AWS load balancer can improve the functionality of the web traffic of the business network. It also improves the business functions in the cloud platform that stores heavy data volume easily.
Final Words
Here we reached to conclude the topic on AWS load balancer and their different types and uses. I hope you enjoyed learning this topic in detail and also got the basic idea of load balancers. These are useful in controlling the heavy incoming traffic over the network and routing them to defined targets. This is carried on through different ways and with regular monitoring of these balancers. The LBs are considered important usage for heavy traffic areas over the network. If you’re are willing to learn more about AWS aspects in real-time, then move on with AWS Online Training at ITGuru. This study may give you the best learning experience with expert guidance to become an AWS specialist.