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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Infrastructure as a Service
  4. Load Balancer Reverse Proxy
  5. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Google Traffic Director

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Google Traffic Director

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Stacks12.8K
Followers8.8K
Votes59
Google Traffic Director
Google Traffic Director
Stacks1
Followers14
Votes0

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Google Traffic Director: What are the differences?

Key Differences between AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Google Traffic Director

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Google Traffic Director are both load balancing solutions that help distribute network traffic across multiple servers or instances. However, there are several key differences between these two services.

  1. Infrastructure: One major difference between AWS ELB and Google Traffic Director is their underlying infrastructure. AWS ELB is a fully managed service provided by Amazon, which means that AWS takes care of all the hardware and software required to run the load balancer. On the other hand, Google Traffic Director is a software-defined networking (SDN) solution that operates at the edge of Google's network.

  2. Load Balancing Algorithms: While both AWS ELB and Google Traffic Director support various load balancing algorithms, they have different default algorithms. AWS ELB uses a round-robin algorithm by default, meaning that each incoming request is distributed sequentially to the available servers in a circular order. Google Traffic Director, on the other hand, uses a least request algorithm by default, which directs each request to the server with the fewest active requests.

  3. Service Discovery: Another notable difference is the approach to service discovery. AWS ELB supports both DNS-based and API-based service discovery. It offers features such as Amazon Route 53 DNS and AWS Cloud Map for managing the service endpoints. In contrast, Google Traffic Director relies on xDS-based service discovery, which uses the Envoy proxy as the sidecar to communicate with the control plane for discovering and routing to services.

  4. Integration with other Services: AWS ELB integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, making it easier to deploy and manage applications within the AWS ecosystem. It has native integrations with services like Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, and AWS Auto Scaling. Google Traffic Director, on the other hand, is tightly integrated with the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), allowing direct integration with services like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Google Compute Engine (GCE).

  5. Protocol Support: AWS ELB supports a wide range of protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, and SSL/TLS. It also provides advanced features like SSL/TLS termination and load balancing of WebSockets. In comparison, Google Traffic Director focuses primarily on HTTP and gRPC-based applications, providing more advanced features for those protocols.

  6. Pricing and Billing: Pricing models and billing structures differ between AWS ELB and Google Traffic Director. AWS ELB offers various pricing options, including pay-as-you-go and reserved instances, with charges based on factors such as the number of load balancers, data transfer, and SSL certificates. Google Traffic Director, on the other hand, falls under the standard pricing structure of Google Cloud, with charges based on factors like network egress, instance usage, and any additional services used.

In summary, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Google Traffic Director differ in terms of infrastructure, load balancing algorithms, service discovery, integration, protocol support, and pricing. Both options have their own strengths and suitability depending on the specific requirements and ecosystem in which they are being used.

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Detailed Comparison

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Google Traffic Director
Google Traffic Director

With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.

A powerful abstraction that's become increasingly popular to deliver microservices and modern applications. Provides policy, configuration, and intelligence to service proxies.

Distribution of requests to Amazon EC2 instances (servers) in multiple Availability Zones so that the risk of overloading one single instance is minimized. And if an entire Availability Zone goes offline, Elastic Load Balancing routes traffic to instances in other Availability Zones.;Continuous monitoring of the health of Amazon EC2 instances registered with the load balancer so that requests are sent only to the healthy instances. If an instance becomes unhealthy, Elastic Load Balancing stops sending traffic to that instance and spreads the load across the remaining healthy instances.;Support for end-to-end traffic encryption on those networks that use secure (HTTPS/SSL) connections.;The ability to take over the encryption and decryption work from the Amazon EC2 instances, and manage it centrally on the load balancer.;Support for the sticky session feature, which is the ability to "stick" user sessions to specific Amazon EC2 instances.;Association of the load balancer with your domain name. Because the load balancer is the only computer that is exposed to the Internet, you don’t have to create and manage public domain names for the instances that the load balancer manages. You can point the instance's domain records at the load balancer instead and scale as needed (either adding or removing capacity) without having to update the records with each scaling activity.;When used in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), support for creation and management of security groups associated with your load balancer to provide additional networking and security options.;Supports use of both the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).
Fully managed with SLA; Sophisticated traffic management; Scale seamlessly with deployment
Statistics
Stacks
12.8K
Stacks
1
Followers
8.8K
Followers
14
Votes
59
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 48
    Easy
  • 8
    ASG integration
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 1
    Coding
  • 0
    SSL offloading
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Envoy
Envoy

What are some alternatives to AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Google Traffic Director?

HAProxy

HAProxy

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

Traefik

Traefik

A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

Fly

Fly

Deploy apps through our global load balancer with minimal shenanigans. All Fly-enabled applications get free SSL certificates, accept traffic through our global network of datacenters, and encrypt all traffic from visitors through to application servers.

Envoy

Envoy

Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.

Hipache

Hipache

Hipache is a distributed proxy designed to route high volumes of http and websocket traffic to unusually large numbers of virtual hosts, in a highly dynamic topology where backends are added and removed several times per second. It is particularly well-suited for PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and other environments that are both business-critical and multi-tenant.

node-http-proxy

node-http-proxy

node-http-proxy is an HTTP programmable proxying library that supports websockets. It is suitable for implementing components such as proxies and load balancers.

Modern DDoS Protection & Edge Security Platform

Modern DDoS Protection & Edge Security Platform

Protect and accelerate your apps with Trafficmind’s global edge — DDoS defense, WAF, API security, CDN/DNS, 99.99% uptime and 24/7 expert team.

DigitalOcean Load Balancer

DigitalOcean Load Balancer

Load Balancers are a highly available, fully-managed service that work right out of the box and can be deployed as fast as a Droplet. Load Balancers distribute incoming traffic across your infrastructure to increase your application's availability.

F5 BIG-IP

F5 BIG-IP

It ensures that applications are always secure and perform the way they should. You get built-in security, traffic management, and performance application services, whether your applications live in a private data center or in the cloud.

Google Cloud Load Balancing

Google Cloud Load Balancing

You can scale your applications on Google Compute Engine from zero to full-throttle with it, with no pre-warming needed. You can distribute your load-balanced compute resources in single or multiple regions, close to your users and to meet your high availability requirements.

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