With the new Network Load Balancer, organizations have even more capabilities when it comes to managing scalable infrastructure in the cloud.
While Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and the Application Load Balancer have been around for quite some time, Amazon has recently released a Network Load Balancer (NLB). This tool is fully API-compatible with the Application Load Balancer and is able to handle many millions of requests per second, yet still ensure high throughput and low latency at scale.
Features of the new Network Load Balancer
Below are a few of the more important features of the new Network Load Balancer that enable instant scalability with little effort.
- Static IP addresses – Each NLB will receive one IP address per Availability Zone. This allows customers to divert traffic across different instances within VPC subnets located in each AZ. In addition, you can select an elastic IP address for each Availability Zone. By having complete control over IP addresses, customers can use the Network Load Balancer functionality in complex situations where the addresses may need to be manually entered into DNS records and custom firewall rules, among other scenarios.
- Long lasting connections – NLB offers support for built-in fault tolerance, which lends itself well for connections that may stay open for long periods of time. This makes NLB a good option for gaming, IoT, and messaging applications.
- Zonality – By utilizing an IP address for each Availability Zone, latency can be reduced, which in turn boosts performance and improves availability while making Network Load Balancers completely transparent to any client applications. An NLB will also work to route source requests to targets in one Availability Zone, but still offer the support for failover if those targets suddenly become unavailable.
- Failover – NLB supports failover between IP addresses both within as well as across regions. Route 53 health checks help power these failover features.
- Source IP Address Preservation – NLB doesn’t require modifications to either the source IP address or ports for any incoming connections. This allows standard firewall rules and VPC Security Groups to be used on targets.
Tips when choosing a load balancer
While there are many use cases for Network Load Balancers, it’s also important to understand other load balancers in order to determine your needs. Below are the different types of load balancers currently supported by EC2 instances:
- Application Load Balancer (ALB) – Ideal for load balancing of HTTP/HTTPS traffic. Application Load Balancers provide advanced request routing including support for a wide array of modern application architectures.
- Network Load Balancer (NLB) – Ideal for the balancing the load of TCP traffic. Network Load Balancers can handle millions of requests per second, all while maintaining extremely low latencies. NLB’s are optimized for sudden and changing traffic patterns while using a single IP address for each Availability Zone.
- Classic Load Balancer (CLB) – This type of load balancer is best used with applications built using the EC2-Classic network.
Network Load Balancers are available in all AWS regions except for China
If you’re looking for more information about Network Load Balancers, feel free to reach out to the CloudHesive team today. With large-scale availability in most AWS regions, the time is now to learn more about how they can improve the efficiency of your AWS instances. Get in touch with us at 800-860-2040 or through our online contact form.
