Extreme Performance with Network Load Balancers

In today’s fast-paced digital era, where every millisecond counts, minimizing latency and optimizing network performance have become paramount for businesses. Network load balancing plays a crucial role in achieving these goals. By distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers, network load balancing ensures efficient resource utilization, enhances scalability, and reduces latency.

We can see in the above diagram, choose a network load balancer if you need ultra-high performance.

What is a Network Load Balancer?

A Network Load Balancer operates on the Transport Layer (Layer 4) of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model rather than the application layer, making it ideal for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic. It is suitable for applications anticipating an unexpected spike in traffic because it can handle millions of concurrent requests per second.

Network load balancing is the process of evenly distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers or resources. This intelligent traffic management technique helps to eliminate overload on individual servers and optimizes resource utilization.

Components of AWS NLB

A load balancer serves as the single point of contact for clients. The following are the two main components of the AWS NLB:

Listeners. Before an AWS NLB can be used, an admin must add one or more listeners. A listener is a process that uses the configured protocol and port number to look for connection requests. The rules defined for a listener dictate how an NLB routes traffic to the target groups.

Target groups. A target group consists of multiple registered targets to which the listener can route traffic, such as Amazon EC2 instances, IP addresses, microservices, and containers. A target can be registered with multiple target groups, which increases the availability of the application, especially if demand spikes.

How does load balancing work in AWS?

The network load balancer performs health checks on targets to ensure traffic is routed to only high-performing resources. When a target becomes slow or unresponsive, the NLB routes traffic to a different target.

Features of Network Load Balancer

Network Load Balancer serves over a million concurrent requests per second while providing extremely low latencies for applications that are sensitive to latency.

The Network Load Balancer allows the back end to see the client’s IP address by preserving the client-side source IP.

Network Load Balancer also provides static IP support per subnet.

To provide a fixed IP, Network Load Balancer also gives the option to assign an Elastic IP per subnet.

Other AWS services such as Auto Scaling, Elastic Container Service (ECS), CloudFormation, Elastic BeanStalk, and CloudWatch can be integrated with Network Load Balancer.

To communicate with other VPCs, network load balancers can be used with AWS Private Link. AWS Private Link offers secure and private access between on-premises networks, AWS services, and VPCs.

Network load balancing offers several key advantages:

Improved Scalability: By distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers, network load balancing ensures that your system can handle increasing demands without compromising performance.

Enhanced Redundancy: Network load balancing introduces redundancy into your network infrastructure. If one server fails or experiences a high load, the load balancer automatically redirects traffic to the healthy servers, eliminating downtime.

Minimized Latency: Latency, Network load balancing helps minimize latency by dynamically directing requests to the server with the lowest latency or optimal proximity.

How to Create a Network Load Balancer?

To create a network load balancer, log in to the management console then type EC2 in the search and select EC2 under services. On the EC2 console under load balancing, select load balancers.

Fill in your load balancer details. Under name give it a name, leave it on internet facing and IPV4 address then scroll down to the networking section.

select your VPC, then under mappings select the availability zones make sure to select the AZs where your targets will reside for the EC2 instance target then under security Select the security group for your load balancer then scroll down.

Under listener will move with TCP on port 80. Then for default action, click Create Target group. Remember you can also create it before.

In the target group console, under target types, we will move with instances, and for a name call it NLB-Target. Leave it on TCP port 80, select your VPC then scroll down and click next.

Then under register targets, select your instances, I had already created two instances for this demo. will select my instances. Then click Include as pending below then click Create target group.

Come back to the network load balancer and select your target group. It will now be showing up.

Scroll down to review the summery then click create load balancer.

This is how we create a network load balancer. This brings us to the end of this blog. Make sure to clean up.

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