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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 Pound vs node-http-proxy

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Pound vs node-http-proxy

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Pound
Pound
Stacks11
Followers24
Votes0
node-http-proxy
node-http-proxy
Stacks17
Followers40
Votes2
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Stacks12.8K
Followers8.8K
Votes59

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Pound vs node-http-proxy: What are the differences?

# Introduction
In the context of web servers and load balancing, it is crucial to understand the key differences between AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Pound and node-http-proxy.

1. **Protocol Support**: AWS ELB supports a wide range of protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, and SSL, while Pound provides support for TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS protocols. Node-http-proxy, on the other hand, supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols. The differences in protocol support can impact the compatibility and flexibility of these load balancers based on the specific requirements of the application.

2. **Load Balancing Algorithms**: AWS ELB offers predefined load balancing algorithms such as round-robin, least connections, and IP hash, providing a variety of options for distributing incoming traffic. Pound, on the other hand, primarily focuses on round-robin load balancing. Node-http-proxy can be configured with custom load balancing algorithms tailored to specific use cases, offering a more flexible approach compared to the predefined options provided by ELB and Pound.

3. **Scalability**: AWS ELB is a fully managed service provided by AWS, offering automatic scalability and high availability, making it suitable for handling large-scale applications. Pound and node-http-proxy, being standalone software solutions, require manual configuration and management for scalability, limiting their scalability potential compared to a fully managed service like ELB.

4. **Integration with Ecosystem**: AWS ELB seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as Auto Scaling, Route 53, and CloudWatch, allowing for a comprehensive cloud infrastructure setup. Pound and node-http-proxy lack direct integration with cloud service ecosystems, requiring additional configuration and setup for achieving similar functionalities available with ELB in an AWS environment.

5. **Monitoring and Analytics**: AWS ELB provides detailed monitoring and analytics features through CloudWatch, enabling real-time visibility into the performance and health of the load balancer and applications. Pound and node-http-proxy may require third-party tools or manual monitoring setups for similar visibility, potentially leading to added complexity in monitoring and troubleshooting compared to the integrated monitoring capabilities of ELB.

6. **Cost Structure**: AWS ELB follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on usage, which can be cost-effective for dynamic workloads. Pound and node-http-proxy, being standalone software, may involve upfront costs for deployment and maintenance, potentially requiring additional resources for ongoing support and updates, leading to different cost structures compared to the managed service model of ELB.

In Summary, understanding the key differences in protocol support, load balancing algorithms, scalability, integration with the ecosystem, monitoring and analytics capabilities, and cost structures between AWS ELB, Pound, and node-http-proxy is essential for making informed decisions on selecting the appropriate load balancing solution for specific use cases in web server configurations.

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Detailed Comparison

Pound
Pound
node-http-proxy
node-http-proxy
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

Pound was developed to enable distributing the load among several Web-servers and to allow for a convenient SSL wrapper for those Web servers that do not offer it natively.

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

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.

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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
11
Stacks
17
Stacks
12.8K
Followers
24
Followers
40
Followers
8.8K
Votes
0
Votes
2
Votes
59
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 1
    Programmable
  • 1
    Opensource
Pros
  • 48
    Easy
  • 8
    ASG integration
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 1
    Coding
  • 0
    SSL offloading
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2

What are some alternatives to Pound, node-http-proxy, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GLBC

GLBC

It is a GCE L7 load balancer controller that manages external loadbalancers configured through the Kubernetes Ingress API.

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