I would like to know if there is any difference between AWS's internal load balance and external load balancer besides the fact that only clients on the VPC can communicate with the internal load balancer.
Is there any perfomance difference like one of them answering faster or one of them being cheaper?
The only difference I could think of would be the internal load balancer making the data transfer cheaper.
An internal load balancer is assigned to a private subnet and does not have a public IP. It cannot be accessed by a client not on the VPC (even if you create a Route53 record pointing to it). If you want clients to be able to connect to your load balancer who are not on the VPC, you need to set up an internet-facing load balancer.
An internal load balancer routes traffic to your EC2 instances in private subnets. The clients must have access to the private subnets.
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I have a VPC with a public and a private subnet. I want my auto scaling applications to live in the private subnet, so I'll need to access them via a load balancer in the public subnet. These applications also need to talk to each other internally.
I'm trying to use Elastic Beanstalk to create an internal network load balancer in my private subnet, which is pointing to my applications in the private subnet. Then I have manually created a public application load balancer in my public subnet. But it seems that my application load balancer is struggling to route to my network load balancer.
Is this a reasonable set up? I've seen lots of examples of a public facing network load balancing which is pointing to an internal application load balancer, but not the other way around. I've been able to get that to work but I can't redirect http to https at the network load balancer which is why I'd prefer it the other way around. If nothing else I'm thinking to have CloudFront in front of a public, network load balancer in front of a private network load balancer, and then handle the TLS and redirect from CloudFront instead.
Thanks
Is this a reasonable set up? I've seen lots of examples of a public facing network load balancing which is pointing to an internal application load balancer, but not the other way around.
Unfortunately no, that is not a reasonable setup, because it is not supported by AWS. An application load balancer can not forward traffic to another load balancer.
It's unclear from your description why you need a load balancer pointing at another load balancer at all. Your backend service can belong to multiple target groups, so multiple load balancers can forward traffic directly to your service. In other words, the public load balancer can forward traffic directly to your private services, without going through the private load balancer.
I have two Elastic Beanstalk instances inside the same VPC -- one with public load balancing (internet accessible), one with internal load balancing only.
For extra security, I'd like the internal instance to be completely siloed from the public internet -- no data can enter and no data can exit unless it is through another instance in my VPC.
Is what I am looking for, a "siloed" instance, accomplished by making my load balancer VPC internal only? That is, can that the internal only instance make a request to www.google.com (or another random site) while inside the VPC, or will it not be able to get outside of the VPC? Or alternatively do I need to set outbound security groups to prohibit all traffic not to my other instances.
This is the internal setting I am talking about in Elastic Beanstalk:
Visibility: Internal
Make your load balancer internal if your application serves requests only from connected VPCs. Public load balancers serve requests from the Internet.
As a side note, I have set my security groups so that the only outbound connection is the load balancer and VPC security group. But I am wondering if internal load balancing takes that a step further, regardless of what I set in my outbound rules.
An internal load balancer will/can route traffic to both instances within a Public Subnet or a Private Subnet. Routing traffic via an internal load balancer does not affect or impact the visibility of the instances to or from which the traffic is routed from the load balancer.
I have created one internal load balancer and application deployed on that internal network. For testing purpose I have created one instance in same VPC called "instance1". I am able to curl to load balancer from this instance1 but I am not able to ping this internal load balancer from outside of VPC.
My future plan is to deploy UI on external load balancer and call internal load balancer from there.
Query is, as I am not able to connect to internal load balancer from outside how my UI instance will be able to do the same.
Internal Loadbalancers are for internal connections only. For reaching out your load balancer from a different network, you can use VPC Peering (connect two GCP network) or use Interconnect products (VPN or Direct connection) for secured/dedicated intranet access.
If your application is intended to be accessible from the outside world (the internet), you can use an external load balancer (Layer 4 or Layer 7 if your application is HTTP based).
I have a load balancer created in my VPC with two subnets. Now I want to open a firewall rule from within my company intranet. I have no control over this firewall. But to open a rule on the firewall - the firewall team is accepting only ip addresses and not the DNS names.
But since the IP address of the load balancer keeps changing I can't give it to the firewall team. That's where I am stuck.
How can I open a firewall rule to an AWS load balancer from within my intranet?
You are correct that an Application Load Balancer does not provide static IP addresses.
You might be able to change to a Network Load Balancer:
Elastic Load Balancing creates a network interface for each Availability Zone you enable. Each load balancer node in the Availability Zone uses this network interface to get a static IP address. When you create an Internet-facing load balancer, you can optionally associate one Elastic IP address per subnet.
It is also possible to put a Network Load Balancer in front of an Application Load Balancer to gain the benefits of both.
See: Using static IP addresses for Application Load Balancers | AWS Networking & Content Delivery Blog
What is the difference between the internal and external load balancer?
Assume I created an internal load balancer inside a VPC. Is it possible to access the internal load balancer outside the VPC?
Consider I have two AWS accounts A and B. I created an internal load balancer in account A. Is it possible to attach the internal load balancer to Route 53 in account B?
An internal load balancer is assigned to a private subnet and does not have a public IP. It cannot be accessed by a client not on the VPC (even if you create a Route53 record pointing to it). If you want clients to be able to connect to your load balancer who are not on the VPC, you need to set up an internet-facing load balancer.
An internal load balancer routes traffic to your EC2 instances in private subnets. The clients must have access to the private subnets.
The nodes of an Internet-facing load balancer have public IP addresses.
The DNS name of an Internet-facing load balancer is publicly resolvable to the public IP addresses of the nodes. Therefore, Internet-facing load balancers can route requests from clients over the Internet.
The nodes of an internal load balancer have only private IP addresses. The DNS name of an internal load balancer is publicly resolvable to the private IP addresses of the nodes. Therefore, internal load balancers can only route requests from clients with access to the VPC for the load balancer.
Ref: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/classic/elb-internal-load-balancers.html
It is possible to access the internal load balancer outside the VPC.
You need to have an IP route to the private addresses. In your example you might have a VPC-A in AWS account A and VPC-B in AWS account B.
If you connect those 2 VPC for example via AWS VPC Peering (or any other method) and you have proper routing tables configured to route the IP traffic between the two VPCs (or subnets) then you can access the private ALB in VPC-A from the VPC-B.