It sounds like I cannot use an elastic ip with AWS Application Load Balancer.
I currently own a domain through GoDaddy and the DNS server points to the load balancer via the CNAME. However, if the load balancer dies and gets recreated, its url changes and I then have to change the CNAME and wait for the change to propagate.
There must be a solution around this - what is it?
It looks like the solution might be to use two load balancers - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/using-static-ip-addresses-for-application-load-balancers/, but this seems really excessive - I have a small application right now.
As far as I know, the only way to have a fixed static-IP for a LB is to use a Network Load Balancer.
As stated here
Support for static IP addresses for the load balancer. You can also assign one Elastic IP address per subnet enabled for the load balancer.
An Elastic Load Balancer retains its DNS name as long as you don't replace it manually. If you still want to have a temporary, low-cost solution to this problem, you can consider the following approach:
Assuming the application is deployed in a private subnet, I would proxy the traffic through an EC2 instance until your primary DNS changes propagate.
Launch a small EC2 instance and attach an Elastic IP to it (consider your bandwidth requirements to determine which size).
Configure a proxy (nginx) to forward traffic to your application.
Configure active-passive DNS failover using ELB DNS name and EIP.
Related
I have set ALB with fargate, currently I can access to ALB with dns name like this
myapp-LoadB-FDEWFSOAQXD4-f18c75dd4249a10d.elb.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com
However it is said this DNS could be changed.
So I want to give this the Elastic IP
I have experienced connection EC2 and Elastic IP.
In Elasitc IP panel I can choose instance.
However, there is not ALB is listed.
How can I set Elastic IP to ALB ? or am I wrong basically?
Two options here, depending on what kind of direction you are heading:
If you do not like the default DNS name
You can create a DNS record that will point to your load balancer. This means that people would be able to surf to your website by using www.whitebear.com instead of myapp-LoadB-FDEWFSOAQXD4-f18c75dd4249a10d.elb.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com
See: Routing traffic to an ELB load balancer - Amazon Route 53
If you really want to attach an ElasticIp to a loadbalancer
There are some use cases where it is really needed to be able to surf to a loadbalancer using a fixed IP. You can achieve this by setting up a Global Accelerator on AWS.
With Global Accelerator, you are provided two global static public IPs that act as a fixed entry point to your application, improving availability.
More information can be found on the AWS Global Accelerator page
If you wish to create a 'friendly' name for an Application Load Balancer, you can create a CNAME record in your Domain and point it to the DNS Name of the Load Balancer.
If you wish to point the Apex of your domain (eg example.com), you can use an Alias in Amazon Route 53 to point to the Application Load Balancer. (It is not normally possible to point a Domain apex to a CNAME record, so the Alias capability of Route 53 will do it for you.)
See: Routing traffic to an ELB load balancer - Amazon Route 53
I have a website that I have hosted on an EC2 instance that runs on port 3000. (e.g. 3.27.83.19:3000 - assuming the IP address of the EC2 instance is 3.27.83.19)
I have a domain that I have already bought mydomain.com through AWS that I already see in Hosted Zones.
How can I set-up Route53 so that when someone hits "mydomain.com", it takes them to 3.27.83.19:3000 rather than 3.27.83.19
Thanks!
point domain to instance ip
To point example.com to 3.27.83.19 you simply need to create an A record in route53
point domain to load balancer
To access the website running port 3000 on an EC2 instance through https://example.com, you need a service that accepts traffic on https://example.com and then forward the traffic to the EC2 instance on port 3000. You can easily do it with an AWS application load balancer. I like this approach.
There are many benefits using an application load balancer. The important one is that you can configure the SSL certificate easily. The application load balancer also supports host based routing which allows you to host multiple websites.
If you are looking for less expensive solutions, you can also go for setting up an nginx proxy inside the ec2 instance. I personally don't like this approach because you will need to configure SSL at the application level.
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/public-load-balancer-private-ec2/
Hope this helps.
I have a load balancer configured to have an IPV4 Ip address. However, the provided IP is a DNS mapped IP address to the load balancer of the format *.ap-south-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
I need to configure IOT devices to send data to the load balancer and they do not support DNS. How can I assign a static IP address like ... to my load balancer so that I can configure my IOT devices to send data to it.
The Elastic IPs section does not provide a facility to allocate it to a load balancer and only supports ec2 instances.
Conclusion:
I have found a way to use DNS on my IOT device and working on this was vital. I am now aware of the option of manually hosting a load-balancer on an EC2 instance. A simper alternative is forwarding all requests at an elastic IP addressed EC2 instance to the load balancer. However, this will cause a bottleneck at the transparent proxy. Hence, I think using the DNS feature on the IOT device is the best option.
Elastic Load Balancers do not support static IP addresses. They only support DNS CNAMEs (or Aliases if you are using Route 53). This is because ELB DNS entries will resolve to different IP addresses depending on how it is scaling between availability zones. Also, over time, the IP addresses will/may change.
The AWS documentation also specifically states to create CNAME-records only when mapping custom DNS entries to your ELB. If you are using Route 53, you can create an Alias record, which look like an A-record to the outside world.
If you need a static IP address, then you cannot use ELB.
Instead, you will need to manage your own load balancer (HAProxy, nginx, etc.) on an EC2 instance using an Elastic IP address.
It would not be possible to assign a static IP with the elastic load balancer. You need to use DNS name only.
The only way I am aware of doing this is by setting up your instances within a VPC and having dedicated NAT instances by which all outbound traffic is routed.
Here is a link to the AWS documentation on how to set up NAT instances:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_NAT_Instance.html
AWS Elastic Load Balancer does not support assigning a static IP address due to many reasons.
Looking at your problem, the issue you are facing is having large amount of data sources to pump data to AWS. I suggest you to use AWS Kinesis Firehose service instead of the current approach as Firehose specifically focus on streaming data into AWS.
How can I assign a static IP address to a ELB. Seems like I cannot.
Some articles online asks to create a Route 53 record but this requires changing CNAME of domain which also redirect email traffic. I just want to change A record not CNAME.
Some articles also mention that I can use a EC2 instance as a reverse proxy. But will a single proxy be able to handle a lot of traffic?
Any solution for this?
AWS' Elastic Load Balancer is actually elastic on two levels as described here:
http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/07/elastic-in-elastic-load-balancing-elb.html
The first level is the load balancer itself. In order to make sure that ELB can scale to whatever volume you have and burst to whatever volume you suddenly encounter, AWS assigns a 'static' DNS hostname (e.g. MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com). That hostname points to multiple IP addresses. You can see that (from a command line) by running
$ host MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com
MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com 172.31.7.2
MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com 172.31.11.33
The second form of elasticity within the ELB is obviously then ELB directing the query to one of your EC2 instances in the pool.
So, you can see that trying to assign a static IP address to the load balancer would be self-defeating.
Using an EC2 instance as a reverse proxy would also seem self-defeating as you would then create a bottleneck before even getting to the ELB. Might as well just create your own load balancer.
The recommended solution (which you've pointed out) is to create a CNAME that points to the ELB hostname (which won't change).
i.e. my-app.mycompany.com ->
MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com
This would allow you to integrate your scalable application, behind the ELB within your domain.
I'm not sure I fully understand why you cannot create a CNAME in your DNS or what that has to do with directing email traffic, can you explain?
A new feature in AWS (I believe it was announced at Re:Invent 2017) allows for static IPs with Network Load Balancers (NLB). NLB can only handle layer 4 (TCP) and not HTTP specifics (layer 7).
You can assign one Elastic IP address per availability zone.
For details see the AWS blog post or the NLB documentation.
The "Classic Load Balancer" and "Application Load Balancer" do not support static IPs. If you need a feature only provided by those, you have to fall back to the CNAME solution described above.
A blog was recently published by AWS support on this topic leveraging NLB to provide static IP to Classic and Application load balancer - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/using-static-ip-addresses-for-application-load-balancers/
Summary of solution as described by the post
We end up with a TCP listener on a NLB that accepts traffic and forwards it to an internal ALB. The ALB terminates TLS, examines HTTP headers, and routes requests based on your configured rules to target groups with your instances, servers, or containers. The AWS Lambda function keeps everything in sync by watching the ALB for IP address changes and updating the NLB target group. In the end we’ll have a few static IP addresses that are easy for whitelisting, and we won’t lose any of the benefits of ALB. Note that we will be sending all of the traffic through two load balancers
I found setting up AWS Global Accelerator very straight forward and simple. It created 2 static IP Addresses and a static DNS pointing to my Application load balancer.
Configuring Global Accelerator
Set listeners as TCP port 80, 443
Select your load balancer endpoint (AWS Global Accelerator Configuration)
Add cname record for your dns pointing to the static dns it created
(mywebsite.com > globalacceleratorDNS.com). If any client needs to
whitelist, give them the 2 static IP it created
Pricing is $18 per month + a few pennies per GB of data transfer.
I'm pretty sure its cheaper than the NLB, Nat Gateway, Elastic IP setup.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/about-accelerators.html
For little traffic, it might be a solution to set up an EC2 Instance running Nginx as a forwarding proxy.
So you can use the EC2's static IP Address to forward your traffic resolving the ALB's DNS name.
However, it's a kind of a hack, but using a Global Accelerator or an NLB seems to me also like a hack :-)
Unlike the Network Load Balancer, the Application Load Balancer (ALB) does not support Elastic IPs, but that's not the worst part. If you use Route 53 together with the ALB, the DNS automatically sets the TTL to 60 seconds. This appears to be causing problems for our institutional - mainly government - customers running older Windows DNS servers. They just can't keep up with the ALB's Listener changing its public-facing IP on such a short notice. Older DNS infrastructure is either not respecting or is not capable of handling such aggressive TTL.
While I don't like it, AWS recommends to put a Network Load Balancer in front of the Application Load Balancer, per here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/using-static-ip-addresses-for-application-load-balancers/
My question is simple. Does it make sense to have an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) with just one EC2 instance?
If I understood right, ELB will switch traffic between EC2 instances. However, I have just one EC2 instance. So, does it make sense?
On the other hand, I´m using Route 53 to route my domain requests example.com, and www.example.com to my ELB, and I don´t see how to redirect directly to my EC2 instance. So, do I need an ELB for routing purposes?
Using an Elastic Load Balancer with a single instance can be useful. It can provide your instance with a front-end to cover for a disaster situation.
For example, if you use an auto-scaling group with min=max=1 instance, with an Elastic Load Balancer, then if your instance is terminated or otherwise fails:
auto-scaling will launch a new replacement instance
the new instance will appear behind the load balancer
your user's traffic will flow to the new instance
This will happen automatically: no need to change DNS, no need to manually re-assign an Elastic IP address.
Later on, if you need to add more horsepower to your application, you can simply increase your min/max values in your autoscaling group without needing to change your DNS structure.
It's much easier to configure your SSL on an ELB than an EC2, just a few clicks in the AWS console. You can even hand pick the SSL protocols and ciphers.
It's also useful that you can associate different security groups to the actual EC2 and the forefront ELB. You can leave the ELB in the DMZ and protect your EC2 from being accessible by public and potentially vulnerable to attacks.
There is no need to use a Load Balancer if you are only running an single Amazon EC2 instance.
To point your domain name to an EC2 instance:
In the EC2 Management Console, select Elastic IP
Allocate New Address
Associate the address with your EC2 instance
Copy the Elastic IP address and use it in your Route 53 sub-domain
The Elastic IP address can be re-associated with a different EC2 instance later if desired.
Later, if you wish to balance between multiple EC2 instances:
Create an Elastic Load Balancer
Add your instance(s) to the Load Balancer
Point your Route 53 sub-domain to the Load Balancer
With NO ELB :-
Less Secure (DOS Attacks possible as HTTP 80 will be open to all, instead of being open only to ELB)
You won't have the freedom of terminating an instance to save EC2 hrs without worrying about remapping your elastic IP(not a big deal tho)
If you don't use ELB and your ec2 instance becomes unhealthy/terminates/goesDown
Your site will remain down (It will remain up if you use ELB+Scaling Policies)
You will have to remap your elastic IP
You pay for the time your elastic IP is not pointing to an instance around $0.005/hr
You get 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing plus 15 GB data processing with the free tier so why not use it along with a min=1,max=1 scaling policy
On top of the answer about making SSL support easier by putting a load balancer in front of your EC2 instance, another potential benefit is HTTP/2. An Application Load Balancer (ALB) will automatically handle HTTP/2 traffic and convert up to 128 parallel requests to individual HTTP/1.1 requests across all healthy targets.
For more information, see: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/load-balancer-listeners.html#listener-configuration
It really depends on what are you running in the EC2 instance.
While with only one EC2 instance it's not necessary to use ELB (all your traffic will go to that instance anyways), if your EC2 service has to scale in the near future, is not a bad idea to invest some time now and get familiar with ELB.
This way, when you need to scale, it's just a matter of firing up additional instances, because you have the ELB part done.
If your EC2 service won't scale in the near future, don't worry too much!
About the second part, you definitely can route directly to your EC2 instance, you just need the EC2 instance IP. Take a look at the amazon route53 docs. Mind that if your IP is not static (you don't setup an Amazon Elastic IP), you'd need to change the IP mapping everytime the EC2 ip changes.
You can also use an ELB in front of EC2 if for example you want it to be publically reachable, without having to use up an Elastic IP address. As said previously they work well too with ASG's