What is an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)?
Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is a managed load balancing service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It automatically propagates incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses, ensuring high availability and scalability for applications hosted in the AWS cloud.
AWS Elastic Load Balancer offers four types of load balancers:
- Classic Load Balancer (CLB) (previous generation)
- Application Load Balancer (ALB)
- Network Load Balancer (NLB)
- Gateway Load Balancer (GLB)
What is Network Load Balancer (NLB)?
The Network Load Balancer (NLB) is a type of load balancer provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that operates at the transport layer (Layer 4) of the OSI model. It is specifically designed to handle high traffic volumes with ultra-low latency and high throughput. NLB handles millions of requests per second and is well-suited for use cases that need high performance and scalability, such as gaming applications, media streaming, or IoT (Internet of Things) devices.
Key features of Network Load Balancer (NLB)
● Layer 4 load balancing: NLB operates at the transport layer (Layer 4) and performs load balancing based on IP addresses and ports. Without inspecting the application layer data, it distributes traffic transparently across backend targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances or IP addresses.
● High performance and scalability: NLB is designed to handle extremely high traffic volumes with low latency and high throughput. It leverages a combination of scale-out architecture, flow-based load balancing, and optimized network stack to achieve high performance and handle millions of requests per second.
● TCP and UDP support: NLB supports TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) traffic. It can balance the load across targets for both protocols, making it suitable for various applications.
● Elastic IP addresses: NLB provides a static IP address or a set of IP addresses that remain constant even if the underlying targets change. This allows clients to establish long-lived connections or rely on specific IP addresses for communication.
● Connection draining: NLB supports connection draining, which allows in-flight requests to complete before terminating a connection. This ensures active connections are gracefully handled when targets are added or removed from the load balancer.
● Health monitoring: NLB continuously monitors the health of backend targets using configurable health checks. It automatically routes traffic only to healthy targets and avoids sending traffic to targets that fail health checks.
● Cross-zone load balancing: NLB evenly distributes traffic across multiple Availability Zones, allowing applications to achieve fault tolerance and high availability. It balances the load across targets in different Availability Zones, reducing the impact of zone-level failures.
● Integration with AWS services: NLB integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, Auto Scaling, AWS Certificate Manager, and AWS CloudFormation.
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