Amazon recently launched the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB), a direct replacement for Elastic Load Balancers introduced back in 2009. ALB supports Layer 7 traffic inspection and is built to support modern cloud architecture. If you’re building a microservices-based system using ECS, the new load balancers will directly understand container hosting and scaling, with multiple containers and ports per EC2 instance. Content-based routing allows segmentation of requests onto groups of target servers, along with independent scaling of those groups. Health checks performed by the load balancers are much improved, with the ability to capture detailed metrics about application performance. We like everything that we see here, and teams have begun to report successful usage of ALB.
