In a previous post, we deploy an AWS Auto Scaling Group and use a Load Balancer to route traffic among the EC2 in the group. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a range of load balancing solutions to distribute incoming traffic across multiple targets, including EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at AWS Load Balancer, one of the most popular and flexible options for load balancing in AWS.

What is AWS Load Balancer?

An AWS Load Balancer is an essential AWS service that automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. It acts as a single point of contact for clients, routing traffic to healthy targets and monitoring their health. It is designed to handle millions of requests per second and can scale automatically based on traffic.

type of aws load balancer

AWS offers three types of load balancers:

1. Application Load Balancer (ALB): This is a Layer 7 load balancer that is ideal for HTTP/HTTPS traffic. It supports content-based routing, SSL/TLS termination, and sticky sessions.
2. Network Load Balancer (NLB): This is a Layer 4 load balancer that is ideal for handling high volumes of TCP/UDP traffic. It supports static IP addresses, SSL/TLS termination, and can handle millions of requests per second.
3. Classic Load Balancer (CLB): This is the original load balancer service provided by AWS. It is a Layer 4 load balancer that can handle both TCP and HTTP traffic. However, it lacks some of the advanced features of the newer load balancers.
4. Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB): It provides a single entry point for traffic into your network and automatically scales to handle increasing traffic volumes

Each type of load balancer offers different features and capabilities, so it’s important to choose the right one for your specific use case.

advantages of AWS Load Balancer

Using an AWS Load Balancer offers a range of benefits, including:

1. High availability: AWS Load Balancer automatically distributes traffic to healthy targets and can detect and remove unhealthy targets. This ensures that your application is always available and can handle sudden spikes in traffic.
2. Scalability: It can scale automatically based on traffic, ensuring that your application can handle even the highest levels of traffic without downtime.
3. Security: It also supports SSL/TLS encryption, protecting your application from unauthorized access and ensuring that data transmitted between clients and servers is secure.
4. Simplified architecture: By using an AWS Load Balancer, you can simplify your application architecture and reduce the complexity of managing multiple targets.

How to configure an AWS Load Balancer

We will setup the application Load Balancer for this quick walkthrough. To follow, you will also need to deploy an EC2 instance. A free tier one will do.

begin by creating a target group for Load Balancer.

A target group is a collection of EC2 instance that the Application Load Balancer will route the traffic to. And since we will be using the servers deployed by our Auto Scaling Group, we will not need to specify a target here.

Select Instances target type. Enter the name and the protocol. Port 80 is default port for the server web browser.

In the Networking, select the VPC to deploy your Application Load Balancer. Make sure it is the same as where the AWS Auto Scaling Group will be deployed.
Use the HTTP1 or HTTP2 protocol version. And for the Health Check path, we specify the root path of our application.

Click the Next button.

Here we will select the number of AWS EC2 instance we want to be part of the AWS Load Balancer Target Group. Here I select only one EC2, you could select multiple in case of production environment. Then click the Create Target Group.

Create an Application Load Balancer

Scroll down the left menu in you AWS EC2 console. Select Load Balancer. Then select Application Load Balancer.

Enter the Load Balancer name, then select the Internet-Facing for the scheme. We use internet facing because our Load Balancer will be accepting traffic from the public IP address.

Select the IPv4 IP address type.

Select the VPC and Subnet for the Load Balancer.

Then, select the Target Group you created earlier from the dropdown list. Also include the Protocol and Port number.

Then click the Create Load Balancer.

Click on Create Load Balancer.

With that, we have been able to successfully deploy the application load balancer to route traffic within our server base on their availability and health status.

Conclusion

AWS Load Balancer is a powerful and flexible solution for load balancing in AWS. By automatically distributing incoming traffic across multiple targets, it can ensure that your application is always available, scalable,