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

Introduction

In this Markdown code, we will discuss the key differences between AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Docker. Both technologies serve different purposes and understanding their differences is important for making informed decisions while designing and deploying applications.

1. Deployment: AWS Elastic Load Balancing is a fully managed service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. On the other hand, Docker is a platform that allows the packaging and distribution of applications as portable containers. While ELB handles the load balancing aspect, Docker focuses on application containerization and deployment.

2. Scaling: Elastic Load Balancing automatically scales and adjusts capacity to balance the incoming traffic, based on the configured settings. It can handle sudden increases or decreases in traffic by automatically distributing requests to available resources. Docker, on the other hand, offers tools and features for scaling applications within containers. It allows for horizontal scaling of containers across multiple hosts using container orchestration tools like Docker Swarm or Kubernetes.

3. Architecture: ELB operates at the infrastructure level and balances traffic across different resources, such as instances or containers. It works at the DNS level and uses health checks to perform load balancing. Docker, on the other hand, operates at the containerization level, encapsulating the application and its dependencies into a container that can be deployed on various hosts. It focuses on managing the application inside the containers rather than load balancing across multiple containers or hosts.

4. Portability and Flexibility: Docker provides a high degree of portability as containers can be easily moved across different hosts or environments. It allows for flexibility in deployment, enabling application developers to build once and deploy anywhere. AWS Elastic Load Balancing, while it supports a variety of platforms and services, is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem and may not offer the same level of portability or flexibility when compared to Docker.

5. Management and Maintenance: With AWS Elastic Load Balancing, the management and maintenance of load balancers are handled by AWS. It automatically scales, monitors, and performs health checks on the targeted resources. Docker, being a containerization platform, requires the management and maintenance of containers and the underlying infrastructure to be handled by the users. This includes ensuring proper scaling, monitoring, and health management of the containers.

6. Cost Considerations: AWS Elastic Load Balancing is a managed service provided by AWS, which means there are costs associated with using the service. The pricing depends on factors like the type of load balancer, data processed, and requests made. Docker, being an open-source platform, does not have direct costs associated with its usage. However, the cost considerations in Docker would be related to the infrastructure required to run and manage the containers, as well as any additional tools or services used for container orchestration.

In Summary, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Docker differ in terms of deployment, scaling, architecture, portability, management, and cost considerations. ELB focuses on infrastructure level load balancing, whereas Docker focuses on containerization and deployment of applications.