Why You Must Experience Choosing The Right Load Balancer On Amazon: AWS Application Load Balancer Vs. NGINX Plus At Least Once In Your Lifetime

Anyone using highly scalable applications in Amazon Web Services (AWS) now has some options for load balancing:

NGINX or NGINX Plus

AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), now called Classic Load Balancer

The new application loader, described by Amazon as an option for Elastic load balancing.

The new option is described in a blog post and in product documentation. In this publication, we'll examine the new features in Amazon Load Balancer, then compare prices and features with open source NGINX and NGINX Plus. We will also describe the role of Classic Load Balancer in relation to these alternatives.

New features in the application load balancer

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The application load balancer (ALB), such as the Classic Load Balancer, is well integrated into AWS. Amazon describes this as a layer 7 load balancer - though it lacks many advanced features that make people choose a layer 7 load balancer in the first place.

Unlike Classic Load Balancer, ALB has several new features:

Routing based on content. Amazon claims content-based routing for ALB. Currently, ALB can only route traffic based on the model matches to the URL; rules can not select targets based on other criteria. One implication is that each application (identified by a specific domain) requires a dedicated ALB load balancer.

Support for applications containing containers. ALB improves existing support for containers hosted on the Amazon EC2 container service.

More parameters. With content-based routing (limited) in ALB, you can now collect metrics by microservice.

WebSocket support. The ALB supports persistent TCP connections between a client and a server.

HTTP / 2 support. ALB supports HTTP / 2, a superior alternative to delivering secure SSL / TLS content.

ALB is an important upgrade for AWS users who have struggled with the limited feature set of Classic Load Balancer to meet the needs of sophisticated users who need to be able to protect, optimize and control traffic to their web applications. However, it does not combine the capabilities of dedicated reverse proxies (such as NGINX) and load balancers (such as NGINX Plus).

 A better approach to controlling traffic on AWS

Instead of using Amazon ALB, users can deploy NGINX open source or NGINX Plus in AWS to control and load balance traffic. They may want to deploy Classic Load Balancer as an interface to high availability across multiple availability zones. The table compares the features supported by ALB, NGINX, and NGINX Plus.

Of course, you should evaluate your choice of load balancing not by a feature checklist but by evaluating the features you need to deliver your applications seamlessly with high security, maximum uptime, and full control.

Treatment of traffic peaks

The Amazon Classic Load Balancer (formerly ELB) suffered a weak response to maximum traffic. Load balancing instances have been automatically scaled to the current level of traffic and can take several minutes for the ELB to respond and deploy additional capacity when peaks occur. Users had to use a manual, forms-based process to request additional features before peak traffic (known as "preheating"). The ALB is likely to require similar limitations and require similar processes to scale.

NGINX and NGINX Plus are deployed to default instances of Amazon, and our sizing guide provides an indication of the maximum performance potential of each instance type. The price of NGINX Plus is the same for all instance sizes, so it is economical to deploy overcapacity to manage peaks, and it is quick to implement more instances - no form to fill - whenever you need more capacity.

Detection of failing servers with health checks

Our initial tests of Amazon ALB indicate that it does not implement "passive" health controls. A server was not detected as having failed after an asynchronous test verifies that it does not return the expected status code.

We have discovered this by creating an ALB instance for a case group. We configured a health check with a minimum frequency of 5 seconds and a minimum of 2 checks failed and sent a constant stream of queries to the ALB. When we stopped one of the instances, for some requests, ALB returned a 502 error for several seconds until the integrity check detected that the instance was disabled.

Passive health checks prevent these types of errors from being visible to end users.

ALB health checks can only determine the health of an instance by inspecting the HTTP status code (such as 200 OK or 404 not found). These health checks are not reliable; For example, some Web applications override server-generated errors with easy-to-use pages, and some errors are reported only in the body of a Web page. 

NGINX Plus health checks are more powerful, combining responses against the body a response as well as a status code.Pricing Finally, the biggest question you will encounter is if you deploy the new ALB service costs. Load balancing can be an important part of your AWSaccount, and the need to run one instance of the load balancer per application can make it expensive. ALB has this limitation and the price seems even more complex.

Unless you know exactly how many new connections, how many concurrent connections, and how much data you will manage each month - which is very difficult to predict - and you can run the LCU calculation the same way Amazon does, you will fear your account AWS every month. NGINX Plus at AWS offers complete predictability. For a fixed hourly cost plus AWS hosting costs, you get a much more powerful load-balancing solution with full support.

Conclusion

NGINX Plus is a proven, superior solution for layer 7 load balancing with Layer 4 load balancing capabilities. This works well in parallel with Amazon's own ELB / Classic load balancer. ALB is a limited, unproven volume and - for deployment volumes - an expensive solution. Caution suggests waiting for other users regarding features, features, reliability, and expenses before responding to any new solution. We encourage the continued and increasing use of NGINX and NGINX Plus in the AWS environment, it is already a very popular solution. If you are not yet a NGINX Plus user, you can try NGINX Plus for free today.