Application Load Balancer
While ELB and ALB are both load balancers, they function very differently. The main difference between the two services is that the ELB service works at the Layer 4 (transport) of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model and the ALB is a Layer 7 (application) load balancer.
This means that the ELB service can only speak and understand up to the TCP/IP layer. When you configure an ELB, you configure the load balancer port on one side and the instances addresses and ports on the other.
Because the ALB service is a Layer 7 load balancer, in addition to what the ELB can do, it also understands application protocols such as HTTP. This allows for a more complex and granular configuration. A very common use case when ...
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