AWS Elastic Load Balancing: support added for Redirects and Fixed Responses in Application Load Balancer

AWS announced support for two new actions namely, redirect and fixed-response for elastic load balancing in Application Load Balancer last week.

Elastic Load Balancing offers automatic distribution of the incoming application traffic. The traffic is distributed across targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, IP addresses, and containers. One of the types of load balancers that Elastic load offers is Application Load Balancer.

Application Load Balancer simplifies and improves the security of your application as it uses only the latest SSL/TLS ciphers and protocols. It is best suited for load balancing of HTTP and HTTPS traffic and operates at the request level which is layer 7.

Redirect and Fixed response support simplifies the deployment process while leveraging the scale, availability, and reliability of Elastic Load Balancing. Let’s discuss how these latest features work.

The new redirect action enables the load balancer to redirect the incoming requests from one URL to another URL. This involves redirecting HTTP requests to HTTPS requests, allowing more secure browsing, better search ranking and high SSL/TLS score for your site. Redirects also help redirect the users from an old version of an application to a new version.

The fixed-response actions help control which client requests are served by your applications. This helps you respond to the incoming requests with HTTP error response codes as well as custom error messages from the load balancer. There is no need to forward the request to the application.

If you use both redirect and fixed-response actions in your Application Load Balancer, then the customer experience and the security of your user requests are improved considerably.

Redirect and fixed-response actions are now available for your Application Load Balancer in all AWS regions. For more details, check out the Elastic Load Balancing documentation page.