AWS Load Balancers

The AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) is a Layer 7 load balancer that intelligently distributes incoming HTTP/S traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, or Lambda functions. It operates at the application layer, enabling advanced routing capabilities based on content…

Key facts

First appeared
2016
Category
technology
Problem solved
AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) was created to address the limitations of its predecessor, the Classic Load Balancer (CLB), for modern web applications and microservices. It provides intelligent, content-based routing (e.g., path-based, host-based), native support for container orchestration, HTTP/2, WebSockets, and integration with serverless functions, which CLB lacked, making it cumbersome to build highly distributed and decoupled applications.
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud

Related technologies

Notable users

  • Airbnb
  • Amazon.com (internally for various services)
  • Capital One
  • Netflix
  • Countless startups and enterprises utilizing AWS
  • Epic Games