Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs. Radware Alteon

We use Amazon Elastic Load Balancers to serve mobile applications and websites. It works really well. We have not had any problems until now. Last year we integrated the AWS ELB with the EC2 Auto Scaling and now we have a fully working elastic solution. We increase/decrease EC2s instances based on traffic over our load balancers.

Incentivized

These devices caused more problems for our company than benefits, I would never recommend these to colleagues.

Incentivized

• Most obviously it works great for routing traffic between components hosted on Amazon web services
• The ability to dynamically spin up connections is fantastic.
• In general the ease of use and configuration is a selling point.

Incentivized

• Occasionally we have a huge number of users using our network at once, and Amazon ELB isn't quite fast enough to scale effectively when that occurs. But this doesn't happen very often as our usage is usually quite stable
• If we want to add another application to our learning suite, we would have to add another load balancer, which would incur additional cost
• The setup was not easy and could really only be handled by one person on our team with the technical background to do so

Incentivized

• The software web application is beyond terrible, in most of the cases the web was broken or did not have similar functionality the command line interface had.
• The command line interface wasn't a natural looking interface, it was very fumbled and while it ran on Linux, the interface was all menus and sub-menus.
• When enabling different pools for different web services, when a new pool was activated, the old pool connections were all reset instead of allowing HTTP sessions to naturally expire.

Incentivized

AWS Elastic Load Balancing has this trick. First, you need to know how it works. ELB is not the only piece here. ELB has a very close relation with AWS Target Groups. You create or select a target group every time you create a Load balancer. Target groups allow you to connect the load balancer to EC2 autoscaling groups, Lambda functions, or even a single EC2 instance. While this sounds complex, it becomes easy, once you know his tricks. Thanks to the user interface, managing a ELB is an easy task. The rules editor is really useful, although it will need a bit of improvement to some interface items

Incentivized

AWS gives you several support plans. On the free plan, you basicaly need to google for help, but the good news is that AWS Elastic Load Balancing works. We has more than 15 load balancers and we never run into a problem that require support. But you mght consider a support plan if you are going to do something more complex or critical

Incentivized

We have not used any other solution out there in the market but our dev-ops team did deep research and AWS provided us the solution we needed to be cost-effective. Also, the decision to keep working with Amazon was strategic. We were already using other AWS features and [Amazon Elastic Load Balancing] integrates great with those.

Incentivized

We moved away from Alteon to F5 BigIP LTM and just by swapping out the hardware, we saw 40% speed increase in our applications. Everything else is much improved as well, from the web interface to the command line to the API.

Incentivized

• Currently it is too soon to say for sure what kind of impact this will have.
• The ideal goal is that this will be cheaper than having to host our own routing on site.

Incentivized

• While running on these devices, every release caused many interruptions in service and caused thousands of dollars of lost revenue.

Incentivized