Mastering Load Balancer Controller: Ingress Sharing and Target Group Binding in AWS (PART-1)

In the fast-growing cloud world, cloud infrastructure management, and optimizing load balancer configurations are important parts for ensuring efficient traffic distribution and scalability. As everything is moving towards containerization AWS offers a powerful toolset for managing load balancers and their configuration on the Kubernetes cluster including features like Ingress Sharing and Target Group Binding, which play pivotal roles in enhancing load balancer efficiency and flexibility.

In this post, we will show you how you can reduce costs in your professional AWS environment by using Ingress Grouping and integrate existing load balancers using target group binding.

Understand ELB Basics

Before deep-diving into the specifics of Ingress Sharing and Target Group Binding, let’s briefly understand the fundamentals of load balancers. Basically, Load balancers serve as traffic distributors the job is to evenly distribute incoming requests across multiple backend EC2 instances or services. ELB acts as the entry point for all incoming traffic, efficiently routing requests to backend resources based on predefined rules and conditions.

Consolidating Ingress Controllers

Nowadays in every typical microservices architecture, each service often has its own Ingress Controller which is responsible for managing incoming traffic and routing requests to the appropriate backend service. This approach is considered to be a good practice as it isolates and increases flexibility.

Ingress Sharing introduces a concept where multiple services can share a single Ingress Controller (it can be dangerous also if managed incorrectly), consolidating the management of routing rules and reducing overhead. By using Ingress Sharing, organizations can streamline their infrastructure, reduce costs, and simplify the management of ingress resources.

So can it really impact the cost.. simple answer is yes, we can reduce the costs by sharing ALBs across multiple Ingresses, and then it will eventually minimize the number of ALBs needed.

Target Group Binding: Enhancing Backend Routing

The Target Group Binding works with Ingress Sharing by providing finer control over backend routing and resource allocation. With the use of Target Group Binding, users can dynamically bind backend services to specific target groups based on various criteria such as URL paths, host headers, or request methods.

With the use of dynamically binding backend services to target groups, users can adapt to changing traffic patterns and ensure optimal performance under varying load conditions.

Let's Deep Dive…

AWS Loadbalancer Controller is a tool that integrates with ALB (Application Load Balancer) & NLB (Network Load Balancer)with Kubernetes clusters, so basically, it will allow you to configure and manage load balancer using K8s Application Programming Interface (API)

In K8s the ingress is an API object that will give you an external load-balancer IP address to control and access the services in the cluster, It acts as a layer 7 HTTP/HTTPS reverse proxy which allows users to route traffic to different services according to the requested URL path. The AWS Load Balancer Controller will provision and configure the ELB on your behalf.

But it’s common to have multiple services deployed in a single Kubernetes cluster and there is a high possibility that each service may have different configurations for external access, routing rules, and SSL/ TLS termination. In such cases, you might opt to use multiple Ingress resources to manage external access to the services, to tackle this point you need to understand that applications majorly include Ingress resource definition in deployment artifacts (which have Deployments, Services, Volumes, etc.) since they were having application-specific routing rules. Separating Ingress resources is a good practice because it allows teams to modify their ingress resources without affecting traffic routing for other applications in the cluster.

Disadvantage of AWS Load Balancer Controller:

Although utilizing the AWS LB Controller for ingresses can be useful; there’s still a drawback to this approach. The AWS LB controller creates an Application Load Balancer for each Ingress which you define in the configuration, This can result in a higher number of load balancers than necessary. which can ultimately lead to increased costs since each ALB incurs an hourly charge. To get it resolved you can reduce costs by sharing ALBs across multiple Ingresses, which will thereby minimize the number of ALBs needed.

Conclusion

We covered the foundations of AWS’s Load Balancer Controller, Ingress Sharing, and Target Group Binding in this first installment of our series. We talked about how these characteristics help with cloud infrastructure management by facilitating effective traffic distribution, scalability, and cost savings.

AWS Load Balancer Controller deployment and usage best practices will be covered in detail in the upcoming section of our series, so stay tuned. We will discuss how to use Target Group Binding to integrate load balancers that already exist and offer tips for maximizing load balancer efficiency in Kubernetes clusters.

We appreciate your participation as we explore the mysteries of AWS load balancer efficiency. We anticipate providing additional perspectives and useful advice in the next sections of this series. Watch this space for more!