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  • AWS Load Balancing Pricing and Considerations


  • AWS Elastic Load Balancer or AWS ELB is something that is essential in delivering a good online experience. This article outlines the features and the costs associated with choosing an ELB solution.


  • Overview

    AWSs Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) has been a popular solution for balancing workloads. We also spoke about the advantage of using this when you couple it with Route 53 and SSL services (see the other articles in this section).

    Bear in mind that for non TCP applications, the ELB may not work well (at least for the AWS Classic Load Balancer, is that all IP traffic is assumed to be using a TCP port). There are applications that are designed to use UDP ports (telephony, syslog -- to allow for separation between the application that produces the log entry, the reporting engine, and the log storage).

    We think that the reason the AWS is now offering Application Load Balancing (AWS has in some places begun referring to ELB as Classic Load Balancer) and is calling it ALB. What it offers is access to the customization at lower layers of the OSI stack and port forwarding to non EC2 devices in the network.

    Of course health checks are supported.

    Pricing

    As is the case for most of the other AWS services, Amazon charges based on resources usage and uptime. For the ELB:

    • $0.028 per load balancer hour prorated
    • $0.008 per GB of data processed by the load balancer.

    So 1 load balancer would cost about $20/month for uptime. The amount of data transfer will of course depend on how much traffic you are getting, but figure about .1GB/user/month so if you are recieving 1 million users / month, plan on spending about $1000/month in addition to the $20.

    And of course different regions have different costs.

    Amazon uses a slightly different metric for the billing of ALB usage. ALB usage is billed at a rate of $0.0225 per load balancer hour (or partial hour), and $0.008 per LCU hour, although costs can vary by region.

    Multiple TLS Certificates per ELB

    This was not possible until late 2017, but Amazon finally announced that they are launching support for multiple TLS/SSL certificates on Application Load Balancers (ALB) using Server Name Indication (SNI). See this article for more details multiple tls certificates.

    What this means is that the classic load balancer will not work for handle TLS on multiple domains and you must use an ALB.

    Conclusion

    We recommend using an ELB even when you only have 1 service instance running, the ELB will get you:

    • protection against DOS attacks
    • No fixed elastic IP needed. Protection against reverse IP address lookups.
    • Hot swapping hard
    • Free SSL (specially if you host multiple domains)

    The only concern we have is for hosting mail servers behind the ELB, but we can discuss that topic later.

    multiple tls certificates: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-application-load-balancer-sni/


  • Izyware Blog
    Izyware Blog