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ADR-24: Load Balancing Strategy

Status

Adopted

Context

Load balancing is an essential component of any large-scale web application. It is responsible for distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets, ensuring both availability and fault tolerance. The primary choices to consider in our scenario include:

  1. AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB):

    • Pros:
      • Fully managed and integrated with the AWS ecosystem.
      • Provides automatic scaling based on incoming traffic.
      • Supports both Application Load Balancing (Layer 7) and Network Load Balancing (Layer 4).
      • Comes with integrated AWS metrics, monitoring, and health checks.
    • Cons:
      • Might be more costly than self-managed solutions.
      • Less granular control compared to some other tools.

  2. Nginx:

    • Pros:
      • Very popular and widely used for web serving and reverse proxying.
      • Supports both HTTP and TCP load balancing.
      • Offers granular control, SSL termination, and caching capabilities.
    • Cons:
      • Requires manual setup, maintenance, and scaling.
      • Not as deeply integrated into the AWS ecosystem.

  3. HAProxy:

    • Pros:
      • A powerful and fast load balancer.
      • Supports TCP and HTTP load balancing.
      • Provides detailed metrics and logging.
    • Cons:
      • Has a steeper learning curve.
      • Requires manual management, unlike AWS ELB.

Considering the international launch of our travel platform and the requirement to prioritize North America and Western Europe for latency considerations, a solution that can easily handle varying traffic loads and ensure low latency is essential.

Decision

Opt for AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) for the following reasons:

  • Ease of Management: ELB provides a fully managed service, reducing operational overhead.
  • Integration with AWS: ELB is natively integrated with other AWS services, simplifying metrics gathering, monitoring, and auto-scaling.
  • Global Reach: AWS ELB integrates with the Amazon Route 53 service, ensuring efficient routing of users from different regions to the nearest data centers.
  • Built-in Security: ELB offers built-in integrations for AWS security features such as AWS Shield, AWS WAF, and SSL/TLS termination.

Consequences

Pros:

  • Automatic Scaling: ELB handles traffic spikes smoothly without manual intervention.
  • High Availability: ELB automatically distributes traffic across multiple targets, ensuring that if one fails, traffic is rerouted to healthy ones.
  • Enhanced Monitoring: Native integration with AWS CloudWatch for monitoring and alerts.

Cons:

  • Cost Implications: ELB might come with a higher cost than self-managed solutions.
  • Less Granular Control: Some advanced configurations possible in Nginx or HAProxy might be harder or not possible to implement with ELB.