AWS Application Load Balancer • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS Application Load Balancer

#101

Post by jamiesonbecker » Thu, Aug 11, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #94

encoderer wrote: post #38

We plan to do a blog post about this at some point, but we had the pleasure of seeing exactly how elastic the elb is when we switched Cronitor from linode to aws in February 2015. Requisite backstory: Our api traffic comes from jobs, daemons, etc, which tend to create huge hot spots at tops of each minute, quarter hour, hour and midnight of popular tz offsets like UTC, us eastern, etc. There is an emergent behavior t…

250 rps in absolute terms is not enormous; and peaks of 25 times relative to base load is not unheard of. What I think you are indicating is that you have a very unusual thing that ELB is not set up to handle: you go from base to peak load in seconds flat. Or even less? That's interesting and quite unlike the very common model of human visitors to a website ramping up, that ELB is likely designed around.

I'm still addicted to AWS, but Google hit 1M rps with only a seven minute scale time according to their blog way back in 2013.

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2013/11/compute-engine-...

My biggest issue with ELB is how long it takes for the initial instances to get added to a new ELB.. it takes f-o-r-v-e-r... I've seen it take as long as fifteen minutes, even with no load. I'm hoping ALB fixes that.

Re: AWS Application Load Balancer

#102

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 11, 2016, 9:26 PM UTC

teej wrote: post #54

rajivm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any chance the limit of 10 rules will be increased?

Most AWS limitations can be increased by asking support.

[deleted]

Re: AWS Application Load Balancer

#103

Post by mdani » Thu, Aug 11, 2016, 9:34 PM UTC

ihsw wrote: post #22

Can we agree on the terminology for Application Load Balancer and Elastic Load Balancer? * ALB: Application Load Balancer * ELB: Elastic Load Balancer I have seen Application Elastic Load Balancer/AELB, Classic Load Balancer/CLB, Elastic Load Balancer (Classic)/ELBC, Elastic Load Balancer (Application)/ELBA. In any event, I think it is great that AWS is bringing WebSockets and HTTP/2 to the forefront of web technolog…

In my opinion, it is HTTP and WS LB rather than Application LB as it supports just two protocols. In contrast, if you look at F5 load balancer, it can look at LDAP packets or Diameter packets and do a L7 load bakancing. So ALB seems misleading terminology to me as HTTP and WS != All L7 applications

Re: AWS Application Load Balancer

#104

Post by advisedwang » Thu, Aug 11, 2016, 10:24 PM UTC

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #44

So this is pretty much the same as Google HTTP load balancing https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/load-balancing/http/ + websocket & http2?

It sounds like ALB is still regional whereas Google's LB is global.

Re: AWS Application Load Balancer

#105

Post by perfmode » Thu, Aug 11, 2016, 10:25 PM UTC

jeffbarr wrote: post #84

jeffbarr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic Beanstalk supports ALB.

Small correction to my previous answer, Elastic Beanstalk will support ALB in the very near future.

Great. I'm looking forward to the day when I can retire my hacky workarounds to facilitate websockets on Elastic Beanstalk.

Re: AWS Application Load Balancer

#106

Post by oskarpearson » Thu, Aug 11, 2016, 10:47 PM UTC

bgentry wrote: post #48

encoderer wrote: post #38

We plan to do a blog post about this at some point, but we had the pleasure of seeing exactly how elastic the elb is when we switched Cronitor from linode to aws in February 2015. Requisite backstory: Our api traffic comes from jobs, daemons, etc, which tend to create huge hot spots at tops of each minute, quarter hour, hour and midnight of popular tz offsets like UTC, us eastern, etc. There is an emergent behavior t…

I was coming here to ask whether pre-warming is still an issue with the ALB service. Maybe jeffbarr can comment on whether that's changed? GCE's load balancer does not use independent VM instances for each load balancer, instead balancing at the network level. So you can instantly scale from 0 to 1M req/s with no issues at all.

AWS Support has confirmed: while ALB should be faster, it could still require pre-warming depending on the exact use case.

Re: AWS Application Load Balancer

#107

Post by awj » Thu, Aug 11, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

mdani wrote: post #103

ihsw wrote: post #22

Can we agree on the terminology for Application Load Balancer and Elastic Load Balancer? * ALB: Application Load Balancer * ELB: Elastic Load Balancer I have seen Application Elastic Load Balancer/AELB, Classic Load Balancer/CLB, Elastic Load Balancer (Classic)/ELBC, Elastic Load Balancer (Application)/ELBA. In any event, I think it is great that AWS is bringing WebSockets and HTTP/2 to the forefront of web technolog…

In my opinion, it is HTTP and WS LB rather than Application LB as it supports just two protocols. In contrast, if you look at F5 load balancer, it can look at LDAP packets or Diameter packets and do a L7 load bakancing. So ALB seems misleading terminology to me as HTTP and WS != All L7 applications

Judging by how Amazon has handled other things, I wouldn't stick too hard to that conclusion. They tend to focus first on something generally useful and easy then come back to fill in more difficult/less popular options over time.

Re: AWS Application Load Balancer

#108

Post by jdub » Thu, Aug 11, 2016, 11:03 PM UTC

daigoba66 wrote: post #86

These new features are cool... but they still pale in comparison to something like HAProxy. I guess the tradeoff is that with ELB/ALB, like most PaaS, you don't have to "manage" your load balancer hosts. And it's probably cheaper than running an HAProxy cluster on EC2. But for the power you get with HAProxy, is it worth it? Does anyone have experience running HAProxy on EC2 at large scale?

ELB is HAproxy. :-) Sure, you get a lot of flexibility configuring HAproxy yourself, but you also have to run it yourself. 90% of the time it's easier to just use ELB (plus it has some direct integration with other services, like IAM-stored server certs/keys, ASG, etc).

I have swapped out ELB for HAproxy and/or nginx on a couple of occasions. If you know your load and feature requirements intimately, you might be able to do a better job. But it's work.

Re: AWS Application Load Balancer

#109

Post by M2Ys4U » Thu, Aug 11, 2016, 11:14 PM UTC

azylman wrote: post #96

axelfontaine wrote: post #52

It looks like the big missing piece is auto-scaling groups as target groups...

It looks like it supports ECS services as target groups, and ECS services can do auto-scaling.

Not much help if your services aren't containerised though

Re: AWS Application Load Balancer

#110

Post by vacri » Thu, Aug 11, 2016, 11:53 PM UTC

bashcoder wrote: post #59

bgentry wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was coming here to ask whether pre-warming is still an issue with the ALB service. Maybe jeffbarr can comment on whether that's changed? GCE's load balancer does not use independent VM instances for each load balancer, instead balancing at the network level. So you can instantly scale from 0 to 1M req/s with no issues at all.

You can request pre-warming for additional ELB capacity, when you know far enough in advance that you will have a spike. AWS customer service responds by asking 10 clarifying questions via email. The thing is, we can't look under the hood to see currently provisioned and utilized ELB capacity, so we just have to trust that AWS engineers will properly allocate resources according to the answers to those questions. IMO…

It is weird that given how much in the way of tools and self-help that AWS gives you, that prewarming involves this manual process involving a dozen questions, some of which are unanswerable, and there's no 'pre-warming' form to fill out - the service rep gives them to you in free text.