AWS makes every effort to integrate its many service offerings for ease of deployment, ease of use, and added flexibility. Because of the nature of the ELB family, there are many networking services that work with the load balancers and are integrated into the ELB console. We will cover the services that are on the exam in this chapter.
The AWS Config service tracks any changes made to your load balancers or target groups and is integrated into the load balancer console. Config records all changes, and they can be stored in long-term storage for recordkeeping, audits, troubleshooting, and analysis. Automation can be applied to trigger alarms on changes that are outside of the predefined values. The service needs to be enabled in the region where your load balancer resides. By selecting Config on the Integrated Services tab in the ELB web console, you can view all configurations changes that have been made to the service on a searchable timeline. The events data includes the date and time of the change, who the user was, what the event name was such as “create listener,” and then a link to the actual CloudTrail event for a highly detailed record of the change. The Config service is charged per record items logged and the total Config rule evaluations. Config also includes conformance packs that, if applied, are chargeable.
Global Accelerator has integrations with the AWS application load balancer that is used to route user traffic over the AWS global network to the listener port on the load balancer instead of over the slower public Internet.
Select the Integrated Services tab in the EC2 console to record Global Accelerator’s static IP address and DNS name. The DNS record must be updated to route traffic to the Global Accelerator to get to the load balancer. When you create the ALB, you can select to use Global Accelerator to direct traffic over the AWS global network and not traverse the Internet. In the background, AWS integrates the two services together. After creating the accelerator, AWS adds the load balancer as the endpoint and updates the Route 53 DNS records. By using static IP addresses and a global network, this design allows for a single, global entry point into your network to access the load balancer with the added performance of traversing the AWS internal network.
By integrating the two services offerings, you can save the work of creating the accelerator, adding the listener to the accelerator, adding endpoint groups, and attaching the load balancer to the endpoint groups. Figure 4.5 shows the option to add the Global Accelerator service when creating an application load balancer.
CloudFront can be integrated with Amazon’s family of elastic load balancers to act as a front end to the listener and cache content globally for faster response times. By using CloudFront and its global network of edge locations, the content served by the ELB can easily be dispersed worldwide and stored in the local CloudFront cache. When a user requests content, the data is served from the edge location and does not have to reach back to retrieve that content from the region where the ELB is located. This also offloads the workload on the target servers since the data is stored in the edge CloudFront content servers.
CloudFront is most effective when there is a large amount of static content served and the requests come from clients all over the world. The workload on the ALB decreases since it does not have to serve content for every request and the SSL/TLS offload is performed at the CloudFront edge and not the ALB. If the websites are close to the users requesting the content, such as a regional site, the usefulness of CloudFront is diminished because of the proximity of the content to the user’s location.
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