NLB
NLB operates at layer 4 (TCP) and scales to millions of requests per second. It's suited to high throughput, low latency applications. When an AZ is enabled for an NLB, a load balancer node (and associated network interface) is created within that AZ. A public IP address can optionally be assigned to each subnet.
As they operate at layer 4, NLBs preserve the source IP address.
Concepts
- Listeners capture incoming traffic.
- Target Groups represent sets of backends to forward the traffic to for processing.
- Health checks verify that a target within a Target Group is ready to serve traffic.
Targets
Target groups can point at:
- EC2 instances, either manually or via Auto Scaling.
- IP addresses, either on AWS or external.
- ALB instances
Target selection
The target for each incoming request is selected using a flow hash algorithm based on:
- Protocol
- Source IP address
- Source port
- Destination IP address
- Destination port
- For TCP, TCP sequence number
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