AWS Elastic Load Balancer vs. AWS Application Load Balancer
When it comes to managing traffic in a cloud environment, load balancers are a natural choice. AWS offers two types of load balancers: Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and Application Load Balancer (ALB). In this post, we will compare the two and provide you with an impartial comparison.
What are the differences between AWS Elastic Load Balancer and AWS Application Load Balancer?
While both, ELB and ALB serve as a load balancer, their functionality differs from each other.
AWS Elastic Load Balancer, as the name suggests, provides scalable and elastic nature to your cloud workloads. You can use it to distribute incoming traffic across different targets such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. It also helps in handling traffic spikes while ensuring minimum latency.
AWS Application Load Balancer, on the other hand, is designed to manage traffic at the application level. It sits between the clients and the web application servers, and balances traffic to the most appropriate target like Lambda functions, containers, and IP addresses. Its primary focus is on routing traffic based on specific rules to different server targets.
How do they compare in pricing?
AWS Elastic Load Balancer pricing is determined by the bandwidth consumed and the number of requests. It currently costs $0.025 per hour, with an additional $0.008 per GB of data processed.
In contrast, AWS Application Load Balancer has a fixed hourly charge of $0.0225. Its pricing is determined based on the number of load balancer capacity units (LCUs) consumed per hour.
Which one should you use?
This depends on your workload needs. If you require basic load balancing functionality and do not have any specific routing requirements, then AWS Elastic Load Balancer is an excellent choice. It is also more cost-effective if you have high bandwidth requirements.
If your application actively processes HTTP/HTTPS traffic and has complex routing requirements, AWS Application Load Balancer is the way to go. It can route traffic to multiple backend servers based on advanced routing rules set up.