AWS — Network Load Balancer (NLB) Overview

Introduction to AWS Network Load Balancer — What is NLB?

AWS Network Load Balancer (NLB)

TL;DR

Network Load Balancer (NLB) works at the Layer-4 (Transport layer - Connection level) of the OSI model. NLB supports load balancing of applications using TCP, UDP, and TCP_UDP listeners, as well as TLS listeners.

NLB is specifically designed for high performance traffic that is not conventional web traffic. NLB is capable of handling millions of requests per second while maintaining ultra-low latencies.

Read about Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) Overview.

Features

• Layer 4 (Connection-based) Load Balancing — You can load balance both TCP and UDP traffic, routing connections to targets - EC2 instances, microservices, and containers.
• Low Latency — NLB offers extremely low latencies for latency-sensitive applications. NLB has ability to handle volatile workloads and scale to millions of requests per second and provide the best throughput.
• TLS Offloading — NLB supports client TLS session termination (encryption and decryption). This enables you to offload TLS termination tasks to the load balancer, while preserving the source IP address for your back-end applications.
• Preserve source IP address — NLB…