Application Load Balancer vs Network Load Balancer vs Gateway Load Balancer

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Application Load Balancer vs Network Load Balancer vs Gateway Load Balancer

Last updated on January 23, 2024

Application Load Balancer vs Network Load Balancer vs Gateway Load Balancer

Feature Application Load Balancer Network Load Balancer Gateway Load Balancer
Protocols HTTP, HTTPS, gRPC TCP, UDP, TLS IP
Platforms VPC VPC VPC
Health checks HTTP, HTTPS, gRPC TCP, HTTP, HTTPS TCP, HTTP, HTTPS
Cloudwatch Metrics Yes Yes Yes
Logging Yes Yes Yes
Zonal Failover Yes Yes Yes
Connection Draining (deregistration delay) Yes Yes Yes
Load Balancing to multiple ports on the same instance Yes Yes Yes
IP addresses as targets Yes Yes (TCP, TLS) Yes
Load Balancer deletion protection Yes Yes Yes
Configuration idle connection timeout Yes    
Cross-zone load balancing Yes Yes Yes
Sticky sessions Yes Yes Yes
Static IP   Yes  
Elastic IP address   Yes  
Preserve Source IP address Yes Yes Yes

Resource-based IAM permissions/ Tag-based IAM permissions

Yes Yes Yes
Slow start Yes    
Web sockets Yes Yes Yes
PravateLink Support   Yes (TCP, TLS) Yes (GWLBE)
Source IP address CIDR-based routing Yes    

Layer 7

Path-based routing Yes    
Host-based routing Yes    
Native HTTP/2 Yes    
Redirects Yes    
Fixed Response Yes    
Lambda Functions as targets Yes    
HTTP header-based routing Yes    
HTTP method-based routing Yes    
Query parameter-based routing Yes    

Security

SSL offloading Yes Yes  
Server Name Indication (SNI) Yes Yes  
Back-end server encryption Yes Yes  
User authentication Yes    
Session resumption  Yes Yes  
Terminates flow/proxy behavior Yes Yes Yes

Common features between the load balancers:

  • Has instance health check features
  • Has built-in CloudWatch monitoring
  • Logging features
  • Support zonal failover
  • Tutorials dojo strip
  • Supports connection draining
  • Support cross-zone load balancing (evenly distributes traffic across registered instances in enabled AZs)
  • Resource-based IAM permission policies
  • Tag-based IAM permissions
  • Flow stickiness – all packets are sent to one target and return the traffic that comes from the same target.

Reference:

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/features/

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Written by: Jon Bonso

Jon Bonso is the co-founder of Tutorials Dojo, an EdTech startup and an AWS Digital Training Partner that provides high-quality educational materials in the cloud computing space. He graduated from Mapúa Institute of Technology in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in Information Technology. Jon holds 10 AWS Certifications and is also an active AWS Community Builder since 2020.

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