Manage application load balancers

1 Introduction to application load balancers
2 Create a target group
3 Create an application load balancer in AWS
4 Edit an application load balancer to set conditional actions

This page describes AWS application load balancers and links to how to create target groups for load balancers in all providers (AWS, OCI, GCP)

Introduction to application load balancers

Abiquo supports AWS Application load balancers. Application load balancers can send traffic to target groups, which contain IP addresses or VMs. Abiquo also continues to support Classic load balancers. See Manage 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 .

An application load balancer requires:

At least one target group, which will receive traffic from the default conditional action
At least two public subnets (with an Internet gateway) in different availability zones. See Create a private network .

You should create these elements before you create an application load balancer.

Create a target group

See Create a target group

Create an application load balancer in AWS

Before you begin:

Synchronize your virtual datacenters (including VMs, networks, firewalls, firewall rules, and load balancers)
Create firewall policies for your VMs that allow your load balancers to access the VMs
Create a target group with VMs or IP addresses
Create subnets in at least two different availability zones

Privileges: Manage load balancers, Assign load balancers

To create an application load balancer:

Go to Virtual datacenters → select a virtual datacenter → Network → Load balancing → Target groups
Click the + add button to create a target group and complete the dialogs following the AWS documentation
Go to Load balancing → Load balancers
Click the + add button and complete the dialogs following the AWS documentation

Application load balancer general information

Enter general information for an application load balancer

Field	Value

Field	Value
Name	The name of the load balancer. Amazon will only accept the following characters: A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and "-", and you cannot modify the name
Type	For the Type select Application
Addresses	AWS: private or public IP You may be able to change the address to another one in the same VDC by editing the load balancer
Subnets	Select at least two public subnets (with internet gateways) in different availability zones.

Application load balancer routing rules

After you enter general details, create routing rules.

Create a routing rule for an application load balancer

Field	Value

Field	Value
Common protocols	Select one of the common protocols to load presets
Protocols	The incoming protocol to the load balancer. See AWS documentation for accepted values.
Ports	The incoming port to the load balancer. See AWS documentation for accepted values.
Target group	Select a target group
SSL Certificate	For secure connections (e.g. HTTPS), you can add an SSL certificate. The platform will never store or validate the SSL certificate The platform will pass the certificate directly to the provider Select an existing certificate or add a new one. Cannot be used in platform-only load balancers
Add	Click Add to include the routing rule for the load balancer

To delete a routing rule, click the delete button beside the name of the routing rule in the list.

After you create the load balancer, you can edit it, and edit the conditional actions for routing rules.

Application load balancer SSL certificate

For TLS connections, enter a certificate.

Field	Value

Field	Value
Name	Name of the certificate
Certificate	The certificate contents
Intermediate certificate	An intermediate certificate can be issued by a provider to support older browsers that may not have all of the trusted root certificates for that provider, so that users will not receive invalid TLS warnings. If you have an intermediate certificate, add it at the same time as the certificate to ensure that a trusted-chain certificate is configured.
Private key	The RSA private key for the certificate

Application load balancer firewalls

Add firewalls to an application load balancer.

To add a firewall to your load balancer, select your firewall from the list of Firewalls available in your VDC for this provider.

If a firewall is not on the list, it may not have been properly synchronized. In this case, click Cancel, synchronize firewalls, then start again to create a new load balancer.

Edit an application load balancer to set conditional actions

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.

To edit an application load balancer:

Go to myCloud view and select a virtual datacenter
Go to Networks and select an application load balancer
Click the pencil Edit button

Field	Value

Field	Value
Condition	Add one or more conditions for a single action See AWS docs for more details.
Action	There are 3 actions available: `Forward`: Route requests to the target groups specified by the "Forward to" action configuration `Redirect`: Redirect the request based on the "Redirect" action configuration. `Fixed response:` Returns a fixed response based on the "Fixed response" action configuration. Conditional actions are "Listener rules" in AWS, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/listener-update-rules.html .
Target group	For a Forward action, select a Target group
Weight	For a Forward action, enter a Weight value between `0` and `999`.

To edit a conditional action, click the pencil edit button on the left-hand side of the action in the list

To delete a conditional action, click the delete button on the left-hand side of the action in the list.

Use the up arrow and down arrow buttons to change the priority of the conditional actions.