Testing new grounds with elastic load balancing
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
At the moment we are looking at using the elastic load balancer provided by Amazon web services in a trial fashion. Our company has been migrating more and more of our in-house developed applications from on-site platforms to the AWS web platform. Part of this involves routing traffic across the newly deployed microservices and we are looking into using the elastic load balancer to help with this. So far it seems promising although our scale is admittedly low. We have not yet decided to migrate everything over to elb from our previous setup however results are promising as with anything else on the AWS suite the more we use it the more we like it. As far as business problems being addressed it's simply a matter of the security of being the host of the cloud versus having to maintain everything on site and as such the more options we use provided by Amazon web services the less we have to do ourselves.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
It really is a straight-up situation. From my current experience if you have two or more services hosted on Amazon web services that need transactions between each other with a variable flow of traffic then elb is a fantastic method for routing that traffic and making sure that no one back and component gets overloaded with requests while other existing components are just standing there idle waiting for some traffic. As noted earlier in my review we are still doing a trial run with the service as not all of our components are hosted on AWS yet and we aren't having as great luck with transactions between hosted and non-hosted but that could also simply be a learning curve on our part.
