In this course, we shall be discussing Amazon Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) and how ELBs integrate with other AWS services to help provide high availability, improve performance, and increase security for your applications.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, you will have a greater understanding of:
- ELBs integrations with key AWS services
- ELBs importance to Amazon Kubernetes
Intended Audience
Anyone working with AWS Networking will benefit from this course, also if you are:
- Studying for the AWS Networking Specialty certification
- Studying for the AWS Solutions Architect certifications
If you are looking to increase your AWS knowledge, this course is for you.
Prerequisites
Before attending this course, you should be familiar with Amazon ELB, including the different ELB types and how they are configured. Experience with AWS services such as CloudFront, WAF, and Global Accelerator is also desirable but not required.
For more information on these services, please see our existing courses:
- Using Elastic Load Balancing & EC2 Auto Scaling to support AWS workloads
- Introduction to DNS & Content Delivery on AWS
- Protecting your Web Apps against common exploits using AWS WAF
- AWS Networking features essential for a solutions architect
- Using Amazon Route 53 to route end users to internet applications
In this section, we will discuss ELB integration with Amazon Global Accelerator. ACME has decided to duplicate their deployment that exists in the e-us-2 to a second AWS region in Europe, with the possibility of additional deployments of their website in North America in the future. ACME has the following goals: Root user requests the most optimal endpoint, react to changing application health, so that traffic is not routed to failed endpoints, allow ACME to change availability zones, regions, and type of compute without having to change entries in Route 53.
By integrating ELB with AWS Global Accelerator, ACME can achieve all of their goals. Global accelerator provides a fixed set of IP addresses that you can use to access your endpoints in multiple regions. Because these IP addresses are fixed, you can reorganize services as you need without having to update Route 53 with new endpoint IP addresses.
Global Accelerator uses the same edge locations that CloudFront uses so that traffic is moved on to the AWS global network as soon as possible. This gives better performance compared with requests that are just routed through the Internet to get to your endpoints. Global Accelerator checks the health of endpoints and only routes traffic to endpoints that are healthy and Global Accelerator always routes user traffic the optimal endpoint based on performance. Global Accelerator supports the routing of TCP and UDP traffic.
To integrate Global Accelerator with your ELB endpoints, you first create an accelerator. When creating an accelerator, you provide a name for the accelerator, one or more listeners. This is a part and protocol combination that the accelerator is listening for traffic on, one or more endpoint groups. Endpoint groups identify regions and health checks that the accelerator will use, and one or more endpoints. Endpoints are where Global Accelerator routes traffic. Endpoints can be Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, EC2 instances, or elastic IP addresses. Once the accelerator is deployed, you've given the accelerator a DNS name. You will then use Route 53 to map your friendly name to the DNS name of your newly created Global Accelerator.
Mike has worked in IT since 1997, specializing in networking, storage, and architecture. He's been in cloud computing for the last 8 years, working across several cloud platforms but specializing in AWS. He's been involved in many cloud projects over the years covering migrations, hybrid connectivity, security optimization, networking, and storage architecture.
He gained his first training qualification in 1998 and, about 3 years ago, became an AWS Authorized Champion Instructor. He's delivered AWS cloud courses across Europe for a range of clients, with a focus on Architecture, Security, and Networking. He currently holds certifications for the four biggest cloud vendors, including the AWS Solutions Architect Professional, AWS DevOps Engineer, and AWS Advanced Networking specialty certifications.
He lives in the North of England with his wife Frances and their dog Inca.