About the features of AWS's new load balancer "ALB"

This is Ohara from the technical sales department.

This time, I will write about AWS's new load balancer, "ALB."

Overview of ALB

Amazon Web Services (AWS)' new load balancing service
, Application Load Balancer (ALB), is a load balancing service equivalent to an L7 switch, and its
main function is content-based routing according to the contents of packets.

By the way, with the launch of ALB,
the service name of the previous load balancing service "ELB"
has been changed to "Classic Load Balancer (CLB)", and
from now on, the service name ELB will be a collective term for both "ALB" and "CLB".

ALB Features

• Layer 7 content-based routing to target groups
• Support for container-based applications
• WebSocket and HTTP/2 support
• Achieve high levels of fault tolerance across multiple availability zones
• ALB itself automatically increases or decreases capacity

Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/jp/elasticloadbalancing/applicationloadbalancer/

ALB pricing

• ALB startup time
• Load Balancer Capacity Units (LCU) usage

Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/jp/elasticloadbalancing/applicationloadbalancer/pricing/

Content-Based Routing

By using ALB, it is possible to set up and provide multiple functions (services) under one ALB

Patterns where ALB is suitable

If your environment meets any of the following conditions, it may be worth choosing an ALB

• Web applications are built in a service-oriented manner
• Web applications use WebSockets
• The web application supports HTTPS
• The web server supports HTTP/2
• The environment is built using containers

However, you may need to consider choosing CLB in the following cases:

• Need to balance the load of TCP communications other than HTTP and HTTPS
• The website does not support HTTP/2 and has a very high number of new or active connections compared to the amount of data transferred per page

summary

Although ALB has useful new features compared to the previous CLB,
I don't think there is a big difference in usability, so it seems worth trying out.