Load Balancing in the Cloud

Chapter 5. NGINX Plus Quick Start and the NLB

Amazon Web Services has a number of quick start templates to help you bootstrap a demo environment in just a few clicks. AWS has created a quick start that creates a demo environment with NGINX Plus load balancing over two separate applications. The quick start demonstrates routing to different applications based on URL path, round-robin load balancing, and auto registration for Auto Scaling Groups. This chapter will briefly describe what a quick start is, and what the example NGINX Plus quick start builds.

AWS released their Network Load Balancer, NLB, offering in 2017. The NLB is a layer 4 load balancer, meaning this load balancer operates at the transport layer of the OSI model. The transport layer is responsible for reliable transmission of communication over the network; this is the layer in which TCP and UDP operate. This load balancer is unlike AWS’s other load balancing offerings, and this chapter will also show you what makes the NLB different.

Quick Starts and CloudFormation

Amazon quick starts utilize the AWS CloudFormation service to produce an environment for demonstration. These quick starts are intended to exhibit good practice on AWS cloud with as little effort on the user’s side as possible. Amazon wants to show the power and possibilities of their platform without you having to spend an entire day setting things up.

AWS CloudFormation is a service that translates declarative data objects into living AWS resources. ...