AWS — Application Load Balancer (ALB) Overview

Introduction to AWS Application Load Balancer — What is ALB?

AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB)

TL;DR

Application Load Balancer (ALB) works at the Layer-7 (Application layer - Request level) of the OSI model. ALB supports load balancing of applications using HTTP and HTTPS protocols.

ALB simplifies and improves the security of your application, by ensuring that the latest SSL/TLS ciphers and protocols are used at all times.

Read about Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) Overview.

Features

• Layer-7 Load Balancing — You can load balance HTTP/HTTPS traffic to targets - EC2 instances, microservices, and containers based on request attributes.
• Security Features — You can associate security groups with ALB to provide additional security options.
• Web Application Firewall — You can use AWS WAF to protect your web applications on your ALB.
• HTTPS Support — ALB supports HTTPS termination between the clients and the load balancer.
• SSL/TLS Offloading — You can create an HTTPS listener, which uses encrypted connections (SSL offload). ALB supports client TLS session termination. AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) or IAM can be used to manage your server certificates.
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