Application Delivery In Amazon Web Services
Application services alternative to AWS load balancer
Scale Beyond AWS Application Load Balancer Capabilities
Amazon Web Services load balancer solutions like the AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) or AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) lack full-featured load balancing capabilities, multi-cloud traffic management, and real-time application analytics.
Similarly, traditional appliance-based load balancers are not designed for cloud environments, since virtual appliances lack the ability to scale across multiple clouds and cannot support the elasticity and automation required by cloud-native applications. These legacy solutions also lack developer-oriented features and native integration with AWS APIs, and require manual configuration and tedious management of individual instances.
VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer: Enterprise-Class Load Balancing for AWS
NSX ALB offers a type of load balancer featuring multi-cloud traffic management, application analytics, on-demand automatic scaling, advanced security, application monitoring, and more. It also deploys in bare metal, virtualized, or container environments, delivering enterprise-grade services far beyond those of AWS load balancers (AWS ELB / ALB) or virtualized legacy appliances.
NSX ALB Application Delivery Benefits over AWS Load Balancer
Amazon ELB and ALB are only provide only basic load balancing and lack enterprise-class features and advanced policy support. NSX ALB delivers full-featured load balancing and advanced policy support, including:
- Advanced HTTP content switching capabilities
- Comprehensive persistence
- Monitors the health of the load balancer
- DNS services and GSLB across multiple clouds
NSX ALB enables dynamic workload mobility across clouds by delivering a consistent application architectures beyond AWS cloud deployment models. With Avi, enterprises gain the freedom to choose their cloud platforms based on business metrics such as:
- Performance
- Security
- Compliance requirements
- Risk reduction
With the AWS Load Balancer, admins and developers lack integrated, real-time analytics and must deploy other AWS ELB Monitoring or third-party tools for application performance data and visibility. NSX ALB delivers real-time App Insights into:
- Application health
- End-user experience
- Log analytics
- Security insights
AWS ELB and ALB lack advanced security policies, SSL insights, and DDoS capabilities. NSX ALB provides:
- Network ACLs
- Advanced HTTP security policies
- SSL insights
- Intelligent Web Application Firewall (iWAF)
- DDoS detection and mitigation
- Micro-segmentation in container environments
NSX ALB is a 100% REST API-based solution, offering Python SDK, Ansible and Terraform integrations for zero-code automation. It natively integrates with AWS APIs for:
- Spinning up EC2 instances
- Allocating Elastic IPs
- Route53 integration
- Predictive autoscaling
- Availability Zone awareness
