Posted On: Sep 27, 2021
Elastic Load Balancing now supports forwarding traffic directly from Network Load Balancer (NLB) to Application Load Balancer (ALB). With this feature, you can now use AWS PrivateLink and expose static IP addresses for applications built on ALB.
ALB is a managed layer 7 proxy that provides advanced request-based routing. NLB operates at layer 4 and provides support for PrivateLink and zonal static IP addresses. PrivateLink enables private connectivity to your applications without exposing traffic to the public internet, and zonal static IP addresses can simplify your clients’ network and security configurations. Prior to this launch, customers who wanted to integrate NLB with ALB had to set up custom mechanisms, like AWS Lambda functions, to manage ALB IP address changes. With this launch, you can register ALB as a target of NLB to forward traffic from NLB to ALB without needing to actively manage ALB IP address changes, allowing you to combine the benefits of NLB, including PrivateLink and zonal static IP addresses, with the advanced request-based routing of ALB to load balance traffic to your applications. ALB-type target groups are available for NLBs in all commercial AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
To get started, create a new ALB-type target group, register your ALB, and configure your NLB to forward traffic to the ALB-type target group. You can also enable PrivateLink on your NLB to provide your services privately to clients. Please visit the blog post and the NLB documentation to learn more.