I would love to be able to not just attached EC2 instances to ELB's, but also RDS instances.
Come on Amazon, give ELB some love
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Re: Come on Amazon, give ELB some love
#12I would love to be able to not just attached EC2 instances to ELB's, but also RDS instances.
As unrealistic as it is I would love to be able to attach non-Amazon servers.
It's hard to find load balancing as a service.
Re: Come on Amazon, give ELB some love
#13I agree that ELBs need much more functionality.
In order to get around the lack of features, I only use the ELBs for SSL termination (well, and DNS, and autoscaling). For anything fancier, I've developed a coprocess that manages HAProxy behind the scenes. It leverages Auto Scaling notifications to keep the backend instances in sync. It has a REST API so that you can drive configuration, and it works in a master-master configuration.
It's been running in production for about 9 months now, and has proven invaluable. Having hooks at this layer is incredible. I'm able to get amazing debugging information, I can "bumper" the site at the frontend, I can do 100% zero downtime deployments with quick rollback, I can tarpit and rate limit, etc.
Once I added enough "sugar", I started to realize that maybe AWS is doing it right -- it'd be impossible to add all the features that every customer would want to the ELB. However, WebSocket support and request draining are low-hanging fruit. Same goes for the support for generic HTTP methods, which was implemented some time ago.
Re: Come on Amazon, give ELB some love
#14I'd also love to see support for draining - and it seems like we might be in luck in the near future: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=61278&sta... ^-- BenF@AWS commented on June 10th saying that amazon is now actively working on it!
Draining is easy. Your health check should be hitting a url like '/ping' anyway which responds with an OK if the box is in a reasonable state and willing to serve traffic.
I always add an additional check to see if a file called /tmp/down exists, and if it does, return a 500 for the health checks. Existing clients will continue to be served but that instance will get no new connections.
Re: Come on Amazon, give ELB some love
#15I also wish ELB would get security groups like EC2 and RDS already have.
I think a LOT of people revert to HAPRoxy on an EC2 instance because of this.