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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 Traefik

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Traefik

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Stacks12.8K
Followers8.8K
Votes59
Traefik
Traefik
Stacks965
Followers1.2K
Votes93

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

Introduction

This article provides a comparison between AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Traefik. Both services are used for load balancing, but they have several key differences. Here are the top six differences:

  1. Pricing Model: AWS Elastic Load Balancing is a cloud-based service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), and its pricing is based on the usage of the service. On the other hand, Traefik is an open-source load balancer that is free to use. However, businesses using Traefik may need to allocate resources for its deployment and management.

  2. Platform Support: AWS Elastic Load Balancing is specifically designed for cloud-based applications and integrates well with other AWS services. It can easily handle high loads and complex traffic distribution. In contrast, Traefik is more flexible and can be deployed either on-premises or in the cloud, providing easy integration with various infrastructure providers and container orchestration tools.

  3. Feature Set: AWS Elastic Load Balancing offers a variety of integrated features, such as automatic scaling, SSL termination, and health checks. It also provides advanced routing options and supports different load balancing algorithms. Traefik, being an open-source project, has a modular design and allows users to customize its features based on their requirements. It offers many features like automatic service discovery, routing, and SSL certificate management.

  4. Ease of Use: AWS Elastic Load Balancing is a fully managed service, which means AWS takes care of the operational aspects, including scaling, monitoring, and maintenance. It provides an intuitive web interface and APIs for configuration. Traefik, on the other hand, requires manual configuration and setup, but it offers a simple and easy-to-understand configuration format. It also provides a dashboard for monitoring and managing the load balancer.

  5. Scalability: AWS Elastic Load Balancing is designed to handle extremely high traffic loads and can automatically scale its capacity based on demand. It can distribute traffic across multiple AWS Availability Zones to ensure high availability. Traefik is also scalable and can handle large traffic loads, but its scalability depends on the underlying infrastructure and resources allocated to it.

  6. Integration with Container Orchestration: AWS Elastic Load Balancing integrates seamlessly with AWS container orchestration services like Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Kubernetes. It can automatically register and deregister containers based on their lifecycle. Traefik is built specifically for container environments and provides native integration with container orchestration frameworks like Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos. It can automatically detect and load balance traffic to containers within the cluster.

In summary, AWS Elastic Load Balancing is a cloud-native load balancing service with an extensive feature set and tight integration with AWS services. Traefik, on the other hand, is an open-source load balancer that offers greater flexibility and customization options, making it suitable for both cloud and on-premises environments.

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Detailed Comparison

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Traefik
Traefik

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 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.

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).
Continuously updates its configuration (No restarts!); Supports multiple load balancing algorithms; Provides HTTPS to your microservices by leveraging Let's Encrypt (wildcard certificates support); Circuit breakers, retry; High Availability with cluster mode; See the magic through its clean web UI; Websocket, HTTP/2, GRPC ready; Provides metrics; Keeps access logs; Fast; Exposes a Rest API
Statistics
Stacks
12.8K
Stacks
965
Followers
8.8K
Followers
1.2K
Votes
59
Votes
93
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 48
    Easy
  • 8
    ASG integration
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 1
    Coding
  • 0
    SSL offloading
Pros
  • 20
    Kubernetes integration
  • 18
    Watch service discovery updates
  • 14
    Letsencrypt support
  • 13
    Swarm integration
  • 12
    Several backends
Cons
  • 7
    Complicated setup
  • 7
    Not very performant (fast)
Integrations
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Marathon
Marathon
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Docker
Docker
gRPC
gRPC
Let's Encrypt
Let's Encrypt
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Consul
Consul
StatsD
StatsD
Docker Swarm
Docker Swarm

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

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.

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.

GLBC

GLBC

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

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