Different load balancers offered by AWS
Before discussing various load balancer offerings by AWS, let's first try to understand what a load balancer is. A load balancer is a device that distributes network and application traffic across multiple servers.
AWS offers three types of load balancers, and they all fulfill a slightly different set of objectives:
- Classic load balancer: (Previous generation and now deprecated.) This was initially designed to load balance traffic to multiple EC2 instances. It supports protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, and SSL. A common misconception about it is that it acts as a layer 7 (application layer) device, but even if it is a layer 7 device, it doesn't support routing rules based on specific paths (for example,
/test
). This limitation is overcome in the application load balancer. - Application load balancer: This works on layer 7 and supports the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It allows users to configure and route incoming end user...