When it comes to hosting web applications on AWS, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) can be a powerful tool to manage traffic efficiently. ELB is a load-balancing service that automatically distributes incoming web traffic across multiple instances of your application. This ensures that your application can handle high levels of traffic without any downtime or delays.
In this article, we will cover the basics of ELB and how to use it to manage traffic.
Overview of AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS offers three types of ELB that you can choose from, depending on your requirements:
Classic Load Balancer (CLB): This is the original ELB type that routes TCP and HTTP/HTTPS traffic across EC2 instances.
Application Load Balancer (ALB): This delivers HTTP/S/TCP traffic to targets based on the content of the request, and it supports containerized applications.
Network Load Balancer (NLB): This is ideal for handling high volumes of TCP/UDP traffic and is well suited for extreme performance needs.
To use the ELB service, you must create a load balancer and register it with your EC2 instances. After registering an instance, the load balancer will start distributing incoming requests to EC2 instances based on a load balancer algorithm. The algorithm ensures that the incoming requests are distributed evenly among the available EC2 instances.
Creating and Managing AWS Elastic Load Balancers
To create an ELB, follow these steps:
Log in to the AWS console and go to the EC2 dashboard.
Navigate to the Load Balancer section and click on Create Load Balancer.
Select the type of load balancer you want to create (Classic, Application, or Network), and configure its settings based on your requirement.
Choose your EC2 instances that need to be registered with the load balancer.
Configure the listeners and target groups based on your preference.
Review your settings and hit Create Load Balancer
Once you have created an ELB, you can manage it through the Load Balancer section on the EC2 dashboard. You can modify the load balancer settings, add/remove instances, and monitor traffic through the dashboard.
Using AWS Elastic Load Balancers for Traffic Management
Once the load balancer is created and registered with EC2 instances, it can distribute traffic among them effectively. The incoming requests are routed based on the load balancer's algorithm, which balances the traffic load evenly among the registered instances.
AWS ELB also ensures high availability for your application by routing traffic to the healthy and available instances in case of any failure of an instance within the group. ELB keeps monitoring the health of the registered instances by sending regular health-check requests. If any of the instances fail the health check, the ELB removes it from the group of registered instances and stops serving traffic for it.
ELB can also be used with auto-scaling groups to manage traffic to the newly created instances. Auto-scaling groups automatically deploy the new instances when the existing ones reach their capacity limit.
Conclusion
AWS Elastic Load Balancing is an essential service when it comes to managing traffic for web applications. It ensures high availability and provides automatic load balancing among multiple instances. With its user-friendly console, ELB enables you to create and manage load balancers easily. Whether you are using Classic, Application, or Network Load Balancers, you can always rely on AWS ELB to manage the load effectively.