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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Container Registry
  4. Virtual Machine Platforms And Containers
  5. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Docker

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Docker

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Docker
Docker
Stacks194.2K
Followers143.8K
Votes3.9K
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Stacks12.8K
Followers8.8K
Votes59

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.

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Advice on Docker, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

Florian
Florian

IT DevOp at Agitos GmbH

Oct 22, 2019

Decided

lxd/lxc and Docker aren't congruent so this comparison needs a more detailed look; but in short I can say: the lxd-integrated administration of storage including zfs with its snapshot capabilities as well as the system container (multi-process) approach of lxc vs. the limited single-process container approach of Docker is the main reason I chose lxd over Docker.

483k views483k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Docker
Docker
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere

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.

Integrated developer tools; open, portable images; shareable, reusable apps; framework-aware builds; standardized templates; multi-environment support; remote registry management; simple setup for Docker and Kubernetes; certified Kubernetes; application templates; enterprise controls; secure software supply chain; industry-leading container runtime; image scanning; access controls; image signing; caching and mirroring; image lifecycle; policy-based image promotion
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).
Statistics
Stacks
194.2K
Stacks
12.8K
Followers
143.8K
Followers
8.8K
Votes
3.9K
Votes
59
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 823
    Rapid integration and build up
  • 692
    Isolation
  • 521
    Open source
  • 505
    Testa­bil­i­ty and re­pro­ducibil­i­ty
  • 460
    Lightweight
Cons
  • 8
    New versions == broken features
  • 6
    Unreliable networking
  • 6
    Documentation not always in sync
  • 4
    Moves quickly
  • 3
    Not Secure
Pros
  • 48
    Easy
  • 8
    ASG integration
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 1
    Coding
  • 0
    SSL offloading
Integrations
Java
Java
Docker Compose
Docker Compose
VirtualBox
VirtualBox
Linux
Linux
Amazon EC2 Container Service
Amazon EC2 Container Service
Docker Swarm
Docker Swarm
boot2docker
boot2docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Docker Machine
Docker Machine
Vagrant
Vagrant
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2

What are some alternatives to Docker, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)?

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.

LXD

LXD

LXD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.

LXC

LXC

LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers.

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.

rkt

rkt

Rocket is a cli for running App Containers. The goal of rocket is to be composable, secure, and fast.

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.

Vagrant Cloud

Vagrant Cloud

Vagrant Cloud pairs with Vagrant to enable access, insight and collaboration across teams, as well as to bring exposure to community contributions and development environments.

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.

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