Creating a Network Load Balancer

This section walks you through the process of creating a Network Load Balancer in the
AWS Management Console.

Define your load balancer

First, provide some basic configuration information for your load
balancer, such as a name, a network, and a listener.

A listener is a process that checks for
connection requests. It is configured with a protocol and port for the
frontend (client to load balancer) connections, and a protocol and port for
the backend (load balancer to backend instance) connections. In this
example, you configure an Internet-facing load balancer in the selected
network with a listener that receives TCP traffic on port 80.

To define your load balancer

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at
   https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2. From the navigation bar, select a region for your load balancer.
   Be sure to select the same region that you selected for your Amazon ECS
   container instances.

3. In the navigation pane, under LOAD BALANCING,
   choose Load Balancers.

4. Choose Create Load Balancer.

5. On the Select load balancer type page, choose
   Create under
   Network Load Balancer.

6. Complete the Configure Load Balancer page as
   follows:

   1. For Name, type a name for your load
      balancer.

   2. For Scheme, choose either
      internet-facing or
      internal. An internet-facing load
      balancer routes requests from clients over the internet to
      targets. An internal load balancer routes requests to
      targets using private IP addresses.

   3. For Listeners, the default is a
      listener that accepts TCP traffic on port 80. You can keep
      the default listener settings, modify the protocol or port
      of the listener, or choose Add listener
      to add another listener.

   4. For Availability Zones, select the
      VPC that you used for your Amazon EC2 instances. For each
      Availability Zone that you used to launch your Amazon EC2
      instances, select an Availability Zone and then select the
      public subnet for that Availability Zone. To associate an
      Elastic IP address with the subnet, select it from
      Elastic IP.

   5. Choose Next: Configure
      Routing.

Configure routing

You register targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, with a target group. The
target group that you configure in this step is used as the target group in
the listener rule, which forwards requests to the target group. For more
information, see Target Groups for Your Network Load Balancers in the
User Guide for Network Load Balancers.

To configure your target group

1. For Target group, keep the default,
   New target group.

2. For Name, type a name for the target
   group.

3. Set Protocol and Port as
   needed.

4. For Target type, choose whether to register
   your targets with an instance ID or an IP address.

   Important

   If your service’s task definition uses the awsvpc
   network mode (which is required for the Fargate
   launch type), you must choose ip as the target
   type, not instance. This is because tasks that use
   the awsvpc network mode are associated with an
   elastic network interface, not an Amazon EC2 instance.

   You cannot register instances by instance ID if they have the
   following instance types: C1, CC1, CC2, CG1, CG2, CR1, G1, G2,
   HI1, HS1, M1, M2, M3, and T1. You can register instances of
   these types by IP address.

5. For Health checks, keep the default health
   check settings.

6. Choose Next: Register Targets.

Register targets with the target
group

Your load balancer distributes traffic between the targets that are
registered to its target groups. When you associate a target group to an
Amazon ECS service, Amazon ECS automatically registers and deregisters containers with
your target group. Because Amazon ECS handles target registration, you do not add
targets to your target group at this time.

To skip target registration

1. In the Registered instances section, ensure
   that no instances are selected for registration.

2. Choose Next: Review to go to the next page in
   the wizard.

Review and create

Review your load balancer and target group configuration and choose
Create to create your load balancer.

Create an Amazon ECS service

After your load balancer and target group are created, you can specify the
target group in a service definition when you create a service. When each
task for your service is started, the container and port combination
specified in the service definition is registered with your target group and
traffic is routed from the load balancer to that container. For more
information, see Creating an Amazon ECS service in the classic console.