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Amazon Elastic Load Balancing

Score9.5 out of 10

14 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Amazon Elastic Load Balancing?

Amazon's Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers with the vendor states all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to make applications fault tolerant.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Amazon Elastic Load Balancing.
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Testing new grounds with elastic load balancing

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • So far our experience has been limited with the ability for elb to handle transactions when only part of the platform is on Amazon web services.

Most Important Features

  • Dynamically spitting off new connections as back end or front end services are spun up
  • Ease of integration within the AWS platform
  • The pay as you need the mentality of AWS in general and in specific with the elb is a wonderful benefit

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

F5 BIG-IP

Other Software Used

AWS CloudFormation, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Excellent way to manage network load if you already use the AWS suite of applications

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Product Management (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • I like being able to check the status of the load on any of our targets, in real time
  • It is helpful to be able to run diagnostics when we have slowdowns in the network
  • Amazon Elastic Load Balancing integrates well with the other AWS products we are using

Cons

  • 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

Most Important Features

  • Integration with other AWS applications
  • Ability to run diagnostics on network slowdowns or bottlenecks
  • Customization of notifications so we can tell when the network is having issues based on our own benchmarks

Return on Investment

  • Allows us to troubleshoot and address network issues, which improves our end user experience
  • Provides an integrated way to balance our network load without having to deal with other suites besides AWS, saving time and effort
  • Allows us to see the effects that different code changes have on our network performance, which means more efficient development on the back end

Other Software Used

AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Lambda, AWS Managed Services

AWS ELB is a cost-effective solution for load balancing that integrates well with other AWS services

Incentivized
Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Fair price for a all-featured load balancing solution
  • High availability and elasticity. It is secured by Amazon.
  • Integrates well with Amazon WAF

Cons

  • There are not a lot of cons but we can mention the need to always check the quotas for the ELB

Return on Investment

  • Cost effective
  • Single integration with different apps (websites, mobile app, etc)
  • Improved security
  • Allow to create different load balancers based: ALB, CLB, NLB

Alternatives Considered

NGINX and Cloudflare

Other Software Used

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

The right balance to serve high traffic websites

Incentivized
Verified User
Project Manager in Engineering (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We decided to use Amazon Elastic Load Balancing in conjunction with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to host our websites. We have websites that have peak traffic on some periods of the year, so we needed an elastic infrastructure that helps us to serve our websites with no downtimes and good performance. And that's what we get using this platform. So, we now have more reliable websites.

Pros

  • Good price for a complete load balancing solution
  • Very useful rules editor on listener
  • Working in conjuction with AWS WAF, is a good option to protect your applications

Cons

  • Unsing certificates from Amazon Certficate Manager don't work well
  • On high traffic websites can be pricey
  • HTTP/2 implementation creates problems from time to time on Apple devices / Safari

Return on Investment

  • Cost effective solution: we now have more websites, that work better and we pay same as before migrating to AWS
  • Help us on improved security, allowing us to use AWS WAF
  • Rules on listeners allow us to do complicated stuff by ourselves

Other Software Used

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), AWS Firewall Manager, Adobe PhotoShop

Usability