November 14, 2020

The right balance to serve high traffic websites

Verified User

Project Manager in Engineering

Entertainment Company, 51-200 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

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 and Cons

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

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

Likelihood to Recommend

We use AWS Elastic Load Balancers to serve websites. And for this purpose, works extremely well. In the past we used physical load balancers and that was very costly, and not to mention hard to work with on the server content replication side. Now, with AWS Elastic Load Balancers and EC2 Auto Scaling, we have a complete elastic solution, that works as it's supposed to be.

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

Alternatives Considered

In the past we use physical Load Balancers. That solution works, but it had several negative points. The first, it was not elastic. It requires a physical server setup in order to work. Also a technician works for one or more days to set up the solution. And then, we had the servers, that weed to be replicated. That was very costly and requires several hours to process changes on the load balancer.

AWS ELB is a huge step and seriously, after trying it, can't go back to physical servers to serve websites.

Other Software Used

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

Support Rating

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

Usability

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.

Deployment Types	Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	No

Gateway

$0.0125

Application

$0.0225

Network

$0.025

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