Apache Aurora vs AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): What are the differences?

Developers describe Apache Aurora as "An Apcahe Mesos framework for scheduling jobs, originally developed by Twitter". Apache Aurora is a service scheduler that runs on top of Mesos, enabling you to run long-running services that take advantage of Mesos' scalability, fault-tolerance, and resource isolation. On the other hand, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is detailed as "Automatically distribute your incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances". 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.

Apache Aurora can be classified as a tool in the "Cluster Management" category, while AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is grouped under "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy".

Some of the features offered by Apache Aurora are:

• Deployment and scheduling of jobs
• The abstraction a “job” to bundle and manage Mesos tasks
• A rich DSL to define services

On the other hand, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) provides the following key features:

• 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.

Apache Aurora is an open source tool with 616 GitHub stars and 231 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Apache Aurora's open source repository on GitHub.

Coursera, 9GAG, and Quora are some of the popular companies that use AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), whereas Apache Aurora is used by Twitter, Oscar Health, and Medallia. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) has a broader approval, being mentioned in 724 company stacks & 316 developers stacks; compared to Apache Aurora, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.