AWS Application Load Balancer

1. AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) Application Load Balancer (ALB) is one of the most versatile and effective services in AWS. This article will cover how to use it for different purposes, including dealing with a large number of requests that can overwhelm a single machine, distributing traffic across multiple servers, and providing redundancy when using multiple EC2 instances. The blog post intro paragraph can be improved by adding more information about what the reader will learn from reading this blog post. What is Application Load Balancer (ALB)? An Application Load Balancer (ALB) is a fully managed service that enables customers to distribute traffic across multiple EC2 instances, HTTP services, or both. ALBs are deployed within your VPC and can be used with Elastic Load Balancing Classic Target Groups or the new Amazon CloudWatch-based Target Group configuration feature introduced in 2014. An application load balancer (ALB) is a type of network equipment used for distributing web requests among different servers such as those running on an elastic beanstalk environment which allows you to use microservices architecture using clusters stored inside AWScloudwatch. Benefits of Application Load Balancer Benefits (ALB) 1.You can add multiple ports to an EC2 instance so you don’t have to use a port for each service. 2.Load balancers allow you to route traffic to multiple servers in different availability zones. They work by selecting the most efficient server from a list of available targets, and then forwarding requests towards that target via IP address or Amazon EC2 instances. 3.You can see data about your application's performance in real-time, making it easier to identify and fix issues that are affecting the user experience. 4.With the flexibility to change, you can route more applications in one instance. Additionally, grouping target apps allows inter-app communication in microservices easier than ever before and is useful for a simpler architecture. 5.ALB is a more secure service because it uses SSL/TLS certificates, user authentication, and logging combined with the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. We will now create a load balancer for the application oLogin to AWS management console. oClick on EC2 service and scroll down to the load balancers section on the left-hand side.

2.  oClick on Create Load Balancer oClick on Create Application Load balancer  oGive it a name as “DemoALB” and scroll down and select all the Availability Zones which are given there oLeave all the settings as it is and click on Next

3.  oCreate a new security group if you have not created it before oHere a new security group is created and given a name as “my-first-load- balancer-sg” and in Type select HTTP and select Source as Anywhere oClick on Next  oIn this section give your Target group name as “my-first-target-group” oScroll Down and click on Advanced Health check settings oConfigure the settings as shown below figure and click on Next

4.  oIn the Register targets section, you will see EC2 instances if you had created them earlier oIf instances are not created, create them quickly by using Amazon Linux2 AMI and launch them. oHere I had already created instances so I will select both of them and click on Add to register.  oClick on Create oWait for ALB to come to Active state from Provisioning

5.  oNow copy the DNS name and paste it in New Tab and you will see a “Hello World” message  oWe can have multiple listeners which can redirect to multiple target groups oHere we have one listener which is forwarding to my-first-target-group oWe will create another Target group

6. oClick on Create target group oGive it a name as “my-second-target-group” oScroll down and click on Advanced Health check settings and configure it as shown in the below figure

7.  oClick on Next and select any instance and click on Include pending below. oClick on Create Target Group. oIn our, ALB click on the Listeners tab

8.  oWe can have multiple listeners redirecting to multiple target groups oHere we have one listener on Port 80 which is forwarding to my-first- target-group oClick on View/edit rules of this listener to start leveraging other target groups oClick on the + symbol present above and then click on the Insert rule oNow there are 2 conditions “IF” and “THEN” oIn IF- Click on Add condition then select Path and in value type /test oIn THEN click on Add condition and select Forward to then select my- second-target-group oClick on Save

9.  oSo, we have 2 rules, first one is evaluated as a path and target is my- second-target-group if it matches oElse by default, it should route to my-first-target-group oSo here we can add rules and paths and show that Application Load Balancer is way more powerful than Classic Load balancer Congratulations!! You have created your Application load balancer, see you in the next lab. Conclusion: AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) is a feature that can be added to the Amazon Web Services EC2 environment. This service helps distribute traffic across multiple instances of an application or website for improved performance and availability. If you’re looking to learn more about cloud computing technology, please check out our blog posts. We're always happy to answer any questions you may have!