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  5. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Varnish

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Varnish

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Varnish
Varnish
Stacks12.6K
Followers2.7K
Votes370
GitHub Stars887
Forks195
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Stacks12.8K
Followers8.8K
Votes59

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

Introduction:

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Varnish. These two services offer load balancing capabilities but differ in their functionality and implementation. Below are the six main differences between AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Varnish.

  1. Managed Service vs Reverse Proxy: AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a managed service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. On the other hand, Varnish is an HTTP reverse proxy that sits between the client and the server, caching and serving static content to improve performance.

  2. Cloud-Native vs On-Premises: AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is hosted in the cloud and is tightly integrated with other AWS services. It offers high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance. Varnish, on the other hand, is a popular on-premises solution that can be installed on physical or virtual servers in your own infrastructure.

  3. Protocols and Load Balancing Algorithms: AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) supports a wide range of protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, and SSL/TLS. It also offers various load balancing algorithms like round robin, least connections, and IP hash. Varnish, on the other hand, primarily focuses on HTTP and HTTPS protocols and offers load balancing based on request headers, URL paths, and backends.

  4. Integration with AWS Services: AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Certificate Manager. It provides automatic scaling of resources based on the incoming traffic and health checks. Varnish, being an on-premises solution, may require manual configuration and integration with other services.

  5. Caching and Content Delivery: Varnish is known for its powerful caching and content delivery capabilities. It can cache static content and serve it directly from memory, reducing the load on the backend servers. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), on the other hand, focuses more on load balancing and request routing rather than caching and content delivery.

  6. Scalability and Global Availability: AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) offers automatic scaling and the ability to distribute traffic across multiple Availability Zones for high availability. It also provides global load balancing across multiple AWS regions. Varnish, being an on-premises solution, may require manual scaling and configuration for global availability.

In summary, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a managed service provided by AWS that focuses on cloud-native load balancing, integration with other AWS services, and scalability. Varnish, on the other hand, is an on-premises reverse proxy that excels in caching, content delivery, and customizable load balancing.

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Detailed Comparison

Varnish
Varnish
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.

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.

Powerful, feature-rich web cache;HTTP accelerator; Speed up the performance of your website and streaming services
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
GitHub Stars
887
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
195
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
12.6K
Stacks
12.8K
Followers
2.7K
Followers
8.8K
Votes
370
Votes
59
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 104
    High-performance
  • 67
    Very Fast
  • 57
    Very Stable
  • 44
    Very Robust
  • 37
    HTTP reverse proxy
Pros
  • 48
    Easy
  • 8
    ASG integration
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 1
    Coding
  • 0
    SSL offloading
Integrations
No integrations available
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2

What are some alternatives to Varnish, 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.

Section

Section

Edge Compute Platform gives Dev and Ops engineers the access and control they need to run compute workloads on a distributed edge.

Squid

Squid

Squid reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

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.

Nuster

Nuster

nuster is a high performance HTTP proxy cache server and RESTful NoSQL cache server based on HAProxy.

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.

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