CloudFront Design Considerations Design requirements for connecting to AWS CloudFront locations should take geography, technical, and political constraints into consideration. Global Internet connectivity is controlled by the BGP routing protocol that is widely distributed and divided into autonomous systems that are controlled by different entities. This leaves us with little influence on how traffic gets […]

API Gateway Caching To reduce the number of calls to the endpoints and improve response times, caching can be configured to locally store frequent requests on the gateway. API Gateway will cache response for the TTL period. API Gateway will then first check the cache for the response before making an endpoint request if there […]

REST API REST stands for Representational State Transfer. The REST architecture, or RESTful API, is a well-defined schema that allows dissimilar devices and services to interact with each other. The REST API makes calls to the API gateway, which, in turn, proxies the request to backend services in any format required. The REST API’s main […]

Classic Load Balancers The classic load balancer is a legacy service from AWS that was used on the pre-VPC EC2 classic and Standard EC2 VPC instances. It was retired on August 15, 2022, and is no longer available. Pricing was based on the hours (or partial hour) that the load balancer was operational with an […]

Network Load Balancer The AWS network load balancer (NLB) is used for very high-performance use cases and operates at the network layer, layer 4, of the OSI model. The service has a lengthy list of features, as illustrated in Figure 1.15. The NLB can handle millions of connections per second and is used in very demanding […]

Gateway Load Balancers Gateway load balancers are used with virtual network appliances at the network layer 3 of the OSI model. The listener uses a transparent network gateway to distribute traffic across networking devices such as intrusion detection/prevention systems, firewalls, compliance validation, policy enforcement, and deep packet inspection appliances. On-demand scaling allows for the dynamic […]

Application Load Balancers The AWS application load balancer (ALB) is at the high end of the ELB family of load balancers. As the name indicates, it operates at the application layer, or layer 7, of the OSI stack and has a long list of features, as outlined in Figure 1.12. The listener supports unencrypted HTTP […]

Custom Routing Accelerator Custom routing accelerators extend the capabilities to allow you to map specific application IP ports to destinations in one or more AWS regions that you define. This capability allows you to control the destination devices across the AWS network as compared to standard accelerators that do not support routing to a specific […]

AWS Load Balancer Offerings AWS offers three types of elastic load balancers with each designed for a specific use case. In this section we will learn about these AWS service offerings, what they do, how they are different, and which load balancer in the family is the best fit for a given requirement. Tables 1.1 […]

Proxy Connections Proxy protocol connections are used by the classic load balancer to inject source and destination IP addresses and port numbers into the connection request by the load balancer before sending it to the target server. Both TCP and SSL/TLS support is standard. Many applications require this data to not be modified by the […]