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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