Network Traffic Distribution – Elastic Load Balancing – Amazon Web Services

Feature
Application Load Balancer
Network Load Balancer
Gateway Load Balancer
Classic Load Balancer

Load Balancer type
Layer 7
Layer 4
Layer 3 Gateway + Layer 4 Load Balancing
Layer 4/7

Target type
IP, Instance, Lambda
IP, Instance, Application Load Balancer
IP, Instance

Terminates flow/proxy behavior
Yes
Yes
No
Yes

Protocol listeners
HTTP, HTTPS, gRPC
TCP, UDP, TLS
IP
TCP, SSL/TLS, HTTP, HTTPS

Reachable via
VIP
VIP
Route table entry

Layer 7

Redirects
✔

Fixed Response
✔

Desync Mitigation Mode
✔

HTTP header based routing
✔

HTTP2/gRPC
✔

Common configurations and characteristics

Slow start
✔

Outpost support
✔

Local Zone
✔

IP address – Static, Elastic

✔

Connection draining (deregistration delay)
✔
✔
✔
✔

Configurable idle connection timeout
✔

✔

PrivateLink Support

✔ (TCP, TLS)
✔ (GWLBE)

Zonal Isolation

✔
✔

Session resumption
✔
✔

Long-lived TCP connection

✔
✔

Load Balancing to multiple ports on the same instance
✔
✔
✔

Load Balancer deletion protection
✔
✔
✔

Preserve Source IP address
✔
✔
✔

WebSockets
✔
✔
✔

Supported network/Platforms
VPC
VPC
VPC
EC2-Classic, VPC

Cross-zone Load Balancing
✔
✔
✔
✔

IAM Permissions(Resource, Tag based)
✔
✔
✔
✔ (Only resource based)

Flow Stickiness (All packets of a flow are sent to one target, and return traffic comes from same target)

Symmetric

Symmetric

Symmetric

Symmetric

Target Failure behavior

Fail close on targets, unless all targets are unhealthy(fail open)
Fail close on targets, unless all targets are unhealthy(fail open)
Existing flows continue to go to existing target appliances, new flows are rerouted to healthy target appliances.

Health Checks
HTTP, HTTPS, gRPC
TCP, HTTP, HTTPS
TCP, HTTP, HTTPS
TCP, SSL/TLS, HTTP, HTTPS

Security

SSL Offloading
✔
✔

✔

Server Name Indication (SNI)
✔
✔

Back-end Server Encryption
✔
✔

✔

User Authentication
✔

Custom Security Policy

✔

ALPN
✔
✔

Kubernetes Controller

Direct-to-pod
✔
✔ (Fargate pods)

Load Balance to multiple namespaces
✔

Support for fully private EKS clusters
✔
✔