Are you struggling to decide which ingress gateway to choose for your cloud services? Look no further! In this blog post, we'll compare three of the most popular options on the market: AWS Application Load Balancer, Google Cloud Load Balancer, and Azure Traffic Manager. We'll provide objective facts and pricing information to help you make an informed decision.
AWS Application Load Balancer
AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) is a highly available, scalable, and efficient solution for distributing incoming traffic across targets such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. With its advanced routing capabilities, ALB can route traffic based on URL path, host, header, and HTTP method.
ALB provides various features such as SSL/TLS termination, content-based routing, and server name indication (SNI) for groups of multiple applications using a single load balancer. It also supports websockets and is compatible with containers via Amazon ECS or Kubernetes.
Pricing
AWS ALB pricing depends on the number of Load Balancer Capacity Units (LCUs) used per hour and the amount of data processed. The pricing for the US East region is $0.008 per LCU-hour and $0.008 per GB per month for data processed.
Google Cloud Load Balancer
Google Cloud Load Balancer is a global, fully managed, and scalable ingress gateway designed to provide powerful and intelligent traffic distribution for cloud services. Its advanced features include global load balancing, SSL/TLS termination, content-based routing, and multiple backend services.
Load Balancer also supports HTTP/2, gRPC, and health checks to ensure high availability for services. With integration into Google Cloud, it can support multiple regions and provide easy scaling.
Pricing
Google's Load Balancer pricing depends upon the type of load balancer used and billed hourly. The basic Network Load Balancer pricing starts at $0.025 per hour while Regional Load Balancer pricing starts at $0.08 per hour. The cost varies depending on data processed and additional features that include IP addresses and SSL certificates.
Azure Traffic Manager
Azure Traffic Manager is Microsoft’s DNS-based traffic load balancing solution for Azure. It provides automatic failover and geo-routing with flexible traffic-routing methods, including performance, geographic, and weighted options. Azure Traffic Manager can route traffic to endpoints which can be either Azure or external.
Traffic Manager also supports SSL/TLS to ensure secure traffic handling and supports custom domains and subdomains.
Pricing
Azure Traffic Manager pricing depends on the number of DNS queries and the number of endpoints configured. Each DNS query costs $0.50 per million queries and as for endpoints, it's $0.025 per hour per endpoint.
Conclusion
In conclusion, each provider offers a comprehensive and efficient solution for ingress gateways, and deciding which one is the best depends on various factors such as budget, enterprise requirements, and use case scenarios. AWS ALB provides advanced routing capabilities, whereas Google Cloud Load Balancer's main highlight is the comprehensive Google Cloud infrastructure, and Azure Traffic Manager leverages traffic routing for Azure services.
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