Amazon Elastic Load Balancing Reviews

We have a lot of customers who are currently not on Amazon; they are running on-premise data centers. When they ask us to migrate, we migrate their applications to Amazon. Load Balancing is often a component we use. We use HTTPS port 443, and we integrate the load balancer with the applications.

• Very easy to implement.
• Very well integrated into Amazon's services.

It would be good if we had a product that integrates well with third-party vendors. Some of our customers want a multi-cloud solution. They don't want to be tied up to or be in just one cloud. In that case, a third-party solution that could integrate with the cloud as well as with on-premise would be great.

Reporting would be a good feature as well.

I have been working with Amazon Elastic Load Balancing for about two years.

So far it has not given us any problem. It's always running, 24/7.

The workload that we have put on it has not required surplus scalability. It has been able to handle our customers' loads. We have not come across a situation where massive scalability has been required, so far, and we have implemented it for large companies.

We have not reached out to support so far, for Amazon Elastic Load Balancing. 

We do have their API Gateway and we have had to reach out to support twice. The API gateway nodes went down and they had to restart the nodes. I consider API Gateway as also having some kind of internal load balancing.

The setup is straightforward. It took a couple of hours, with one person involved.

I have not seen other products so that I can compare them and tell you the Amazon solution needs improvement. So far, its functionality has been enough for the projects we have done.

We have not used the network load balancer so far in Amazon. We have only used the application load balancer. As far as an application load balancer is concerned, it doesn't require any additional features.

I am using the solution to manage the front end of the application. I have a service where multiple clients log in for usage. The solution helps in load balancing by distributing the traffic to the application.

The solution's most valuable feature is the ease of use. It is more convenient to use compared to self-hosted load balancers.

They should improve the solution's pricing.

I have been using the solution for ten months.

It is a stable solution.

I rate the solution's scalability as a nine. It helps me manage around 100 end users of my application service.

The solution's support team is helpful.

Positive

The services offered by the solution and its competitors are almost similar. But Amazon is much more stable than them. Although, I don't have any quantifiable evidence.

The solution itself has simple functionality. It is straightforward to deploy and doesn't require maintenance.

The solution is expensive. I rate its pricing as a three.

I rate the solution as an eight.

Application Load Balancer is required for redirecting two or more instances. We have got two EKS instances running. So, we have to connect in a round-robin fashion based on when a request needs to be sent to one EKS and when it needs to be sent to another EKS. For this purpose, we use Application Load Balancer.

It has very good features. It is very configurable. Security with TLS, et cetera is also very easy. 

It is good performance-wise, and the logging mechanism is also very good because we get the VPC log whenever a request comes. So, we can easily find out where the request is coming from.

One issue that we faced with ALB was that leaf-level certificate validation was not happening. It is not that user-friendly in that aspect. 

It is stable. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of stability.

We have more than 200 users, and we have 40 technical people.

I have never reached out to them.

Its initial setup is straightforward.

There is a yearly license.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate it an eight of ten.

In my case, I have a microservice-based product that has seven to ten microservices. Based on the routing path, I decide which microservice will receive the request. I set up everything in the rules on the ALB side, and I also manage authentication and authorization through Cognito. Additionally, I have multi-regional products, and I set rules for how many requests are sent to each server.

The best part about ALB is its ability to connect with different services including EC2, ECS, API Gateway, or Lambda functions, offering a lot of benefits like attaching a WAF. Setting up an SSL certificate is straightforward with ALB. It helps with managing traffic loads through Auto Scaling Group, which easily connects with ALB to handle increasing requests. 

Additionally, because I deploy our solution in multiple availability zones, it ensures that the system is always available and does not go down.

The ELB would benefit from allowing deployment in a single availability zone for test servers to avoid unnecessary costs. 

Additionally, the ability to directly block specific IP addresses without additional service integration would be beneficial. 

Furthermore, sometimes ALB has a delay in recognizing the need to scale the system based on CloudWatch metrics, which could use improvement.

I have been working on this load balancing solution for three years.

ALB is stable and there are no major issues with its performance in terms of load handling.

Managing traffic load is efficient as Auto Scaling Group can easily be connected with ALB based on the number of requests. There is a small delay in scaling recognition.

The technical support is very responsive due to the prime-level support package. They quickly reply to any concerns or tickets raised.

Positive

I previously used HAProxy and NGINX, but they required maintenance. ALB is a managed service and is easier to use.

Setting up via AWS console is straightforward. Logging in and starting the ALB is easy. Even Terraform setup is not complex. It involves putting in necessary details like ALB name and target group.

The pricing is moderate; it is neither too high nor too low. However, using ALB incurs a cost as opposed to the free open-source solutions like NGINX or HAProxy.

I evaluated HAProxy and NGINX but switched due to the overhead of maintenance associated with these open-source solutions.

I will definitely recommend ALB to others as there is no maintenance overhead with AWS taking care of everything. For setting up, AWS console makes it easy without requiring extensive management. Overall, I would rate the ELB solution ten out of ten.