Getting started with Network Load Balancers

This tutorial provides a hands-on introduction to Network Load Balancers through the AWS Management Console, a
web-based interface. To create your first Network Load Balancer, complete the following steps.

For demos of common load balancer configurations, see Elastic Load Balancing Demos.

Before you begin

• Decide which Availability Zones you will use for your EC2 instances. Configure
  your virtual private cloud (VPC) with at least one public subnet in each of
  these Availability Zones. These public subnets are used to configure the load
  balancer. You can launch your EC2 instances in other subnets of these
  Availability Zones instead.

• Launch at least one EC2 instance in each Availability Zone. Ensure that the
  security groups for these instances allow TCP access from clients on the
  listener port and health check requests from your VPC. For more information, see
  Target security groups.

Step 1: Configure your target group

Create a target group, which is used in request routing. The rule for your listener
routes requests to the registered targets in this target group. The load balancer checks
the health of targets in this target group using the health check settings defined for
the target group.

To configure your target group

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

2. In the navigation pane, under Load Balancing, choose
   Target Groups.

3. Choose Create target group.

4. Keep the target type as instances.

5. For Target group name, enter a name for the new target
   group.

6. For Protocol, choose TCP, and for
   Port, choose 80.

7. For VPC select the VPC that contains your instances. Keep
   Protocol version as HTTP1.

8. For Health checks, keep the default settings.

9. Choose Next.

10. On the Register targets page, complete the following
    steps. This is an optional step to create a target group. However, you must
    register your targets if you want to test your load balancer and ensure that it
    is routing traffic to your targets.

    1. For Available instances, select one or more
       instances.

    2. Keep the default port 80, and choose Include as pending
       below.

11. Choose Create target group.

Step 2: Choose a load balancer type

Elastic Load Balancing supports different types of load balancers. For this tutorial, you create a
Network Load Balancer.

To create a Network Load Balancer

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

2. On the navigation bar, choose a Region for your load balancer. Be sure to
   choose the same Region that you used for your EC2 instances.

3. In the navigation pane, under Load Balancing, choose
   Load Balancers.

4. Choose Create load balancer.

5. For Network Load Balancer, choose Create.

Step 3: Configure your load balancer
and listener

To create a Network Load Balancer, you must first provide basic configuration information for your
load balancer, such as a name, scheme, and IP address type. Then provide information
about your network, and one or more listeners. A listener is a process that checks for
connection requests. It is configured with a protocol and a port for connections from
clients to the load balancer. For more information about supported protocols and ports,
see Listener configuration.

To configure your load balancer and listener

1. For Load balancer name, enter a name for your load
   balancer. For example, my-nlb.

2. For Scheme and IP address type, keep
   the default values.

3. For Network mapping, select the VPC that you used for
   your EC2 instances. For each Availability Zone that you used to launch your EC2
   instances, select the Availability Zone and then select one public subnet for
   that Availability Zone.

   By default, AWS assigns an IPv4 address to each load balancer node from the
   subnet for its Availability Zone. Alternatively, when you create an
   internet-facing load balancer, you can select an Elastic IP address for each
   Availability Zone. This provides your load balancer with static IP
   addresses.

4. For Listeners and routing, keep the default protocol and
   port, and select your target group from the list. This configures a listener
   that accepts TCP traffic on port 80 and forwards traffic to the selected target
   group by default.

5. For Default action, select the target group that you
   created and registered in step 1.

6. (Optional) Add tags to categorize your load balancer. Tag keys must be unique
   for each load balancer. Allowed characters are letters, spaces, numbers (in
   UTF-8), and the following special characters: + – = . _ : / @. Do not use
   leading or trailing spaces. Tag values are case-sensitive.

7. Review your configuration, and choose Create load
   balancer. A few default attributes are applied to your load
   balancer during creation. You can view and edit them after creating the load
   balancer. For more information, see Load balancer attributes.

Step 4: Test your load balancer

After creating the load balancer, verify that it’s sending traffic to your EC2
instances.

To test your load balancer

1. After you are notified that your load balancer was created successfully,
   choose Close.

2. In the navigation pane, under Load Balancing, choose
   Target Groups.

3. Select the newly created target group.

4. Choose Targets and verify that your instances are ready.
   If the status of an instance is initial, it’s probably because the
   instance is still in the process of being registered, or it has not passed the
   minimum number of health checks to be considered healthy. After the status of at
   least one instance is healthy, you can test your load
   balancer.

5. In the navigation pane, under Load Balancing, choose
   Load Balancers.

6. Select the name of the newly created load balancer to open its details page.

7. Copy the DNS name of the load balancer (for example,
   my-load-balancer-1234567890abcdef.elb.us-east-2.amazonaws.com).
   Paste the DNS name into the address field of an internet-connected web browser.
   If everything is working, the browser displays the default page of your
   server.

Step 5: (Optional) Delete your load balancer

As soon as your load balancer becomes available, you are billed for each hour or
partial hour that you keep it running. When you no longer need a load balancer, you can
delete it. As soon as the load balancer is deleted, you stop incurring charges for it.
Note that deleting a load balancer does not affect the targets registered with the load
balancer. For example, your EC2 instances continue to run.

To delete your load balancer

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

2. In the navigation pane, under Load Balancing, choose
   Load Balancers.

3. Select the checkbox for the load balancer, and choose Actions,
   Delete.

4. When prompted for confirmation, enter confirm and choose
   Delete.