Application load balancers in AWS

Abiquo 5.3 introduces support for AWS Application load balancers. Application load balancers send traffic to target groups of IP addresses or VMs. Abiquo also continues to support Classic load balancers.

For a full description of Application load balancers, see the Amazon documentation at: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/introduction.html.

Application load balancers can balance traffic across target groups. Each Application load balancer requires at least one target group, so you should create this before you create the load balancer.

When you create a new load balancer, you can select the type (Application or Classic). Then you can select an automatically created public IP address so that the load balancer is connected to the internet. You must select two public subnets (with internet gateways) from different availability zones. To create these networks in Abiquo, create a private network and select the Internet gateway option. An application load balancer requires firewalls to allow access for the routing rule and the health check, as for Classic load balancers.

When you create an Application load balancer, each routing rule will redirect all traffic to the default target group. After you create a load balancer, you can edit it and modify the routing rules to manage the conditional actions. For example, you can create an action for requests to a specific path to forward them to one or more target groups, and set a weight for each target group. Or you can redirect requests to another endpoint, or return a fixed response. You can add more than one condition for each action, but each condition can only have one action.

In future versions, Abiquo will introduce support for concepts similar to target groups in other providers, for example, Azure backend pools.