Difference between Elastic Load Balancers & Application Load Balancers on AWS
Elastic load balancers and Application load balancer looks the same but they are actually different. This blog explain the core difference between the two with appropriate diagram for visual illustration.
Elastic Load Balancers
AWS Elastic load balancer improves application availability by distributing incoming traffic or load between two or more Amazon EC2 instances. It routinely checks the health of each EC2 instance, if it finds any unhealthy instances, it stops sending traffic to the instance and re-routes traffic to the healthy instance.
APPLICATION LOAD BALANCERS
Application load balancer allows you to define routing rules based on the content of the request, this lets you efficiently route traffic to specific services within your application instead of just groups of infrastructure instances. For example, an application load balancer will ensure traffic is routed to your ordering services wherever it is running including across dynamic route container-based applications. It is a higher-order routing abstraction that gets the right traffic to the proper application components. It also supports enhanced metrics and health checks to monitor traffic to each application service behind the load balancer. This feature will be helpful to customers running containers or who are migrating monolithic apps to microservices. The application load balancer improves the security of your application by ensuring that the latest SSL TLS cipher and protocols are used at all times. Listener helps application load balancer to route traffic to the appropriate target groups.
