
AWS ALB Review – The Container and Microservice Load Balancer - nzoschke
https://convox.com/blog/alb/
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kennu
ALB seems to be missing a critical part: hostname based routing. Currently all
your container services have to be under the same FQDN.

Also, the limit of 10 virtual hosts per ALB seems very artificial. Otherwise
ALB could be used for virtual hosting of tens or hundreds of low-load
container based web services.

I've implemented virtual hosting manually with an Nginx container, but it
would be really useful to have ALB do that.

~~~
brandur
100% agree, especially when there's a reasonable chance that the ALB itself is
based on Nginx or some other technologies that has no problem with more
complex routing rules or hundreds of virtual hosts.

The good news is that it does seem like Amazon is artificially restricting it
for now, and intends to further open it up later. From the release blog post
[1]:

> As you will see in a moment, each Application Load Balancer allows you to
> define up to 10 URL-based rules to route requests to target groups. Over
> time, we plan to give you access to other routing methods.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-application-load-
ba...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-application-load-balancer/)

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nzoschke
Author here, happy to answer any questions about how ALB could fit into our
cloud architectures.

Aside from growing pains for any AWS service -- figuring out how to use it and
seeing how reliability it is in practice -- this seems like the new path
forward for more of the services we're running on AWS.

------
brandur
The new $16 price point was news to me. I'd seen the $0.008 from Amazon's blog
post, but never broke out the calculator. Especially given that unlike the ELB
you can get support for multiple apps on one, it's great to see some cost
savings there.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has an inkling of how Amazon implemented
in the ALB. It seemed to be a loosely guarded secret that ELBs were actually
just a forked version of HAProxy, and I wonder if they went that direction
again versus implementing their own software from scratch.

~~~
nzoschke
I'd love to know too. If I had to guess it's something new.

They also have the newish API gateway service fronting Lambda.

It wouldn't make much sense giving users their own EC2/HAProxy thing for these
more dynamic load balancing services.

