ECS Fargate + Network Load Balancer Healthcheck - amazon-web-services

I'm experiencing an issue with the following setup:
API Gateway -> VPC Link -> Private NLB -> Target Group -> AWS ECS Fargate
If I setup the NLB's Health Check to be TCP/HTTP on a specified endpoint, that endpoint gets hammered to the death with internal request (no requests are coming through the API Gateway, I checked):
My problem with this behaviour, other than having the health's endpoint spammed by my own architecture is that the application's functionality is suffering (I keep getting slow responses 1 out of 4 get request to the API).
I tried to modify the Health Check's behaviour to only TCP, same slow responses.
I tried temporarily switching to a public ALB, I'm incurring in double health-checks, separated by 30 seconds but my application is responding with an average of 100 ms.
So, as an example of what I mean by "double health-checks":
Health Check 1.1 at 00:00:00
Health Check 2.1 at 00:00:10
Health Check 1.2 at 00:00:30
Health Check 2.2 at 00:00:40
Any ideas?

TL/DR;
Enable the "Cross-Zone Load Balancing" NLB flag.
The issue was the "cross-availability zone" not checked out.
It seems that when a request gets processed by a NLB-node which resides in a different AZ from the one that it is trying to be redirecting, it tries to internally resolve the IP in the AZ, if it fails, it redirects the request to another NLB-node in the appropriate AZ, which will be able to do so, hence reaching the target.

Related

Getting 5xx error with AWS Application Load Balancer - fluctuating healthy and unhealthy target group

My web application on AWS EC2 + load balancer sometimes shows 500 errors. How do I know if the error is on the server side or the application side?
I am using Route 53 domain and ssl on my url. I set the ALB redirect requests on port 80 to 443, and forward requests on port 443 to the target group (the EC2). However, the target group is returning 5xx error code sometimes when handling the request. Please see the screenshots for the metrics and configurations for the ALB.
Target Group Metrics
Target Group Configuration
Load Balancer Metrics
Load Balancer Listeners
EC2 Metrics
Right now the web application is running unsteady, sometimes it returns a 502 or 503 service unavailable (seems like it's a connnection timeout).
I have set up the ALB idle timeout 4000 secs.
ALB configuration
The application is using Nuxt.js + PHP7.0 + MySQL + Apache 2.4.54.
I have set the Apache prefork worker Maxclient number as 1000, which should be enough to handle the requests on the application.
The EC2 is a t2.Large resource, the CPU and Memory look enough to handle the processing.
It seems like if I directly request the IP address but not the domain, the amount of 5xx errors significantly reduced (but still exists).
I also have Wordpress application host on this EC2 in a subdomain (CNAME). I have never encountered any 5xx errors on this subdomain site, which makes me guess there might be some errors in my application code but not on the server side.
Is the 5xx error from my application or from the server?
I also tried to add another EC2 in the target group see if they can have at lease one healthy instance to handle the requests. However, the application is using a third-party API and has strict IP whitelist policy. I did some research that the Elastic IP I got from AWS cannot be attached to 2 different EC2s.
First of all, if your application is prone to stutters, increase healthcheck retries and timeouts, which will affect your initial question of flapping health.
To what I see from your screenshot, most of your 5xx are due to either server or application (you know obviously better what's the culprit since you have access to their logs).
To answer your question about 5xx errors coming from LB: this happens directly after LB kicks out unhealthy instance and if there's none to replace (which shouldn't be the case because you're supposed to have ASG if you enable evaluation of target health for LB), it can't produce meaningful output and thus crumbles with 5xx.
This should be enough information for you to make adjustments and logs investigation.

EC2 Instance giving better output than ELB

We have cluster of 3 EC2 instances. Single EC2 instance is able to server aroung 500 user load on application. But when same EC2 instnace is put in ELB is not even serving for 250 users. We drilled more & put below configuration at different end.
Optimized code to respond in less time.
ELB is set with 300 sec timeout for all responses & healthy.unhealthy checks.
Apache on EC2 is set with 600 as timeout value & keep alive it set true.
ELB is routing request in equal distribution logic.
Every time we hit with higher load(500 on cluster) we are getting end up getting some failures with 504 bad gateway timeout error. Kindly help with solution to get more optimial output.

AWS - Abnormal Data Transfer OUT

I´m consistently being charged for a surprisingly high amount of data transfer out (from Amazon to Internet).
I looked into the Usage Reports of the past few months and found out that the Data Transfer Out was coming out of an Application Load Balancer (ALB) between the Internet and multiple nodes of my application (internal IPs).
Also noticed that DataTransfer-Out-Bytes is very close to the DataTransfer-In-Bytes in the same load balancer, which is weird (coincidence?). I was expecting the response to each request to be way smaller than the request itself.
So, I enabled flow logs in the ALB for a few minutes and found out the following:
Requests coming from the Internet (public IPs) in to ALB = ~0.47 GB;
Requests coming from ALB to application servers in the same availability zone = ~0.47 GB - ALB simply passing requests through to application servers, as expected. So, about the same amount of traffic.
Responses from application servers back into the same ALB = ~0.04 GB – As expected, responses generate way less traffic back into ALB. Usually a 1K request gets a simple “HTTP 200 OK” response.
Responses from ALB back to the external IP addresses => ~0.43 GB – this was mind-blowing. I was expecting ~0.04GB, the same amount received from the application servers.
Unfortunately, ALB does not allow me to use packet sniffers (e.g. tcpdump) to see that is actually coming in and out. Is there anything I´m missing? Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Ricardo.
I believe the next step in your investigation would be to enable ALB access logs and see whether you can correlate the "sent_bytes" in the ALB access log to either your Flow log or your bill.
For information on ALB access logs see: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/load-balancer-access-logs.html
There is more than one way to analyze the ALB access logs, but I've always been happy to use Athena, please see: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/athena-analyze-access-logs/

How to change AWS ELB status to InService?

A WordPress application is deployed in AWS Elastic Beanstalk that has a load balancer. I see sometimes there is ELB 5XX error. To make the instance OutOfService for the higher number of unhealthy threshold count, I set Unhealthy Threshold to 10. But sometimes health check fails and health is Severe. I get sometimes the error "% of the requests to the ELB are failing with HTTP 5xx". I checked the ELB access logs and sometimes request get the timeout (504) error and after a consecutive number of 504, ELB makes the instance OutOfService. I am trying to fix which request is failing.
What I don't know, is it possible to make the instance "InService" as quickly as possible. Because sometimes instance is OutOfService for 2-3 hours, which is really bad. Is there any good way to handle this situation. I am really in trouble with this situation. Looks like after the service is out, I have nothing to do. I am relatively new to AWS. Please help.
To solve this issue:
1) HTTP 504 means timeout. The resource that the load balancer is accessing on your backend is failing to respond. Determine what the path for the healthcheck from the AWS console.
2) In your browser verify that you can access the healthcheck path going around the load balancer. This may mean temporarily assigning an EIP to the EC2 instance. If the load balancer healthcheck is "/test/myhealthpage.php" then use "http://REPLACE_WITH_EIP/test/myhealthpage.php". For HTTPS listeners use https in your path.
3) Debug why the path that you specified is timing out and fix it.
Note: Healthcheck paths should not be to pages that do complicated tests or operations. A healthcheck should be a quick and simple GO / NO GO type of page.

How can I configure an automatic timeout for an Elastic Load Balancer?

Does anyone know of a way to make Amazon's Elastic Load Balancers timeout if an HTTP response has not been received from upstream in a set timeframe?
Occasionally Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk will fail an update and any requests to the specified resource (running Nginx + Node if tht's any use) will hang any request pages whilst the resource attempts to load.
I'd like to keep the request timeout under 2s, and if the upstream server has no response by then, to automatically fail over to a default 503 response.
Is this possible with ELB?
Cheers
You can Configure Health Check Settings for Elastic Load Balancing to achieve this:
Elastic Load Balancing routinely checks the health of each registered Amazon EC2 instance based on the configurations that you specify. If Elastic Load Balancing finds an unhealthy instance, it stops sending traffic to the instance and reroutes traffic to healthy instances. For more information on configuring health check, see Health Check.
For example, you simply need to specify an appropriate Ping Path for the HTTP health check, a Response Timeout of 2 seconds and an UnhealthyThreshold of 1 to approximate your specification.
See my answer to What does the Amazon ELB automatic health check do and what does it expect? for more details on how the ELB health check system work.
TLDR - Set your timeout in Nginx.
Let's see if we can walkthrough the issues.
Problem:
The client should be presented with something quickly. It's okay if it's a 500 page. However, the ELB currently waits 60 seconds until giving up (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=382182) which means it takes a minute before the user is shown anything.
Solutions:
Change the timeout of the ELB
Looks like AWS support will help increase the timeout (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=382182) so I imagine that you'll be able to ask for the reverse. Thus, we can see that it's not user/api tunable and requires you to interact with support. This takes a bit of lead time and more importantly, seems like an odd dial to tune when future developers working on this project will be surprised by such a short timeout.
Change the timeout of the nginx server
This seems like the right level of change. You can use proxy_read_timeout (http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#proxy_read_timeout) to do what you're looking for. Tune it to something small (and in particular, you can set it for a particular location if you would like).
Change the way the request happens.
It may be beneficial to change how your client code works. You could imagine shipping a really simple html/js page that 1. pings to see if the job is done and 2. keeps the user updated on the progress. This takes a bit more work then just throwing the 500 page.
Recently, AWS added a way to configure timeouts for ELB. See this blog post:
http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/elb-idle-timeout-control/