What Should You Know About AWS Elastic Load Balancer?

As the name suggests, it was used traditionally for EC2-classic instances. It operates well on both levels either connection level or the request level. But it does not support features like path-based routing or host-based routing. It needs to be configured first. Once configured, it distributes the load among multiple registered instances regardless of what is available on the server currently. In this way, it is used to distribute the traffic to a single URL. EC2 forms the backbone of AWS. Get to know about EC2 and its instances using AWS.

This load balancer is mainly designed for web applications with HTTP and HTTPS traffic. It is a network-based model called the OSI (Open System Interconnection) model that is used to explain the working of computer networks. The OSI model has seven network layers in total and the top layer is Application layer. 

The Amazon ELB works at the top layer; hence it is named as the application load balancer (ALB). It provides advanced routing features too like path-based routing and host-based routing. It can work with microservices and containers too. You must be wondering what we meant by the host-based and path-based routing here. Let us discuss the concepts in brief below.

Host-based Routing

Consider you have two websites janbask.com and training.janbask.com. Each website is hosted on two EC2 instances for high availability. The next step is distributing incoming traffic between these two websites. With CLB, you have to create two load balancers, one for each website. But the same thing can be done with a single application load balancer i.e. ALB. In this way, you save time and money by using a single ALB instead of two CLBs.

Path-based Routing

Consider your Company website is janbasktraining.com and the blog's page is hosted on janbasktraining.com/blog URL. Now the operation team has to decide whether the main website and the blog page should launch on the same or different instances. With ALB, you can route the traffic to the requested URL. Again, a single ALB is enough to handle both URLs together at highly manageable costs.

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This load balancer operates at the network layer of the OSI model, so it is named as the Network Load Balancer (NLB). Consider, your Company website is running on m4-xlarge instances and you are using an application load balancer to manage the traffic among instances. 

Your Company launched a new product recently and it got viral and started getting millions of requests every second. Here, ALB is not a suitable choice to manage the sudden spike in traffic. In this condition, NLB shines out of three. It has the capability to manage a sudden spike in traffic since it works at the connection level. It is able to handle static IP addresses too.

I hope you have enough ideas now about AWS load balancer key concepts and its different types. Let us go a little practical in the next section.

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To know how to launch an EC2 instance, read our blog - When launching instances given a Name tag to your instance. For the first path, add the tag NAME as the key and MAIN as the value. For the second path, add the tag NAME as the key and BLOG as the value. These values will help you to distinguish quickly between two paths. Once both instances are launched, it should look like this:

SSH into the first instance with the “Name MAIN” and run the following commands to install the Apache server on instances successfully.

After these steps, add the IP address of the instance in the browser and hit ENTER. The Apache server is installed successfully in the first instance. Now, SSH into the second instance with the “Name BLOG” and run the following commands to install the Apache server on instances successfully.

You can see that all commands are the same except for the last one. Now paste the IP address in the browser with the /blog suffix and hit Enter. The Apache server is installed successfully in the second instance.

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A target group guides the load balancer which protocol and port will receive the traffic on the registered instances. 

• Open the Amazon dashboard, in the left navigation bar, scroll down and click on “Target Groups”. 

• Choose the option “Create Target Group” from the top. Give a Target Group “Name” and click “Create” Button. 
• Now navigate to the “Targets” tab at the bottom, click on “Edit”, select the “Main” instance, click “Add to Registered” and Click “Save”.

• After this, create the second target group with the name Blog and add the blog instance to it as we did above.

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Open the Amazon dashboard, in the left navigation bar, scroll down and click on “Load Balancers”. Click on “Create Load Balancer” button on the top.

• Choose the Application Load Balancer (ALB) from available options.

• Give a proper name to the load balancer and add a minimum of two availability zones to increase the availability.
• In the next step, click the “configure security settings” option. You may see a warning message here but it is fine as we are listening to HTTP traffic here. Next, click on “configure security groups” button.

• Now select the same security group that you assigned to the launched instances earlier. Once done, click on the “Configure routing” option.

• From Target groups, select the existing target group. In the Name, select MAIN and click Next.
• Click “Next” again, review, and click Create.

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Congratulations, you have created an Application Load balancer with these easy steps. But we have to configure the Blog instance too, so let us continue. Don’t forget to note down the DNS name here that we need later.

• Select the “Listeners” tab and click “View/Edit rules”.
• Click the “+” sign at the top of each rule. From the Add condition, select “Path is” and type “/blog”.
• Now add action, select Blog then click Save.
• After this, we can use the DNS name of the load balancer to visit two different paths and see the final output.