1

We are building a scaled application that uses WebSockets on AWS EC2. We were considering using the default ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) for this, but that, unnecessarily, makes the load balancer itself a bottleneck for traffic-heavy operations (see this related thread), so we are currently looking into a way to send the client the connection details of a "good instance" to connect to instead. However, the Elastic Load Balancer API does not seem to support a query of the sort "give me (public) connection details of a good instance", which is odd because that is the core functionality of any load balancer. Maybe I have just not looked at the right place?

UPDATE:

Currently, we are investigating two simple solutions using default implementations:

  1. Use ELB in TCP mode which tunnels all traffic through the ELB.
  2. Simply connect to the public IP of the instance that the ELB connected you to for your GET request. The second solution requires public IPs to be enabled, but does not route all traffic through the ELB.

I was concerned about that very last part because I assumed that the ELB is not in the same building as the instance it gave you. But I assume, it usually is in the same building or has some other high-speed connection to the instances? In that case, the tunneling overhead is negligible.

Both solutions seem to be equally viable, or am I overseeing something?

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Domi
  • 22,151
  • 15
  • 92
  • 122

2 Answers2

1

If your application manages to make the ELB a bottleneck, then you are a pretty big fish. Why don't you try first using their load balancer trusting that they do their job right? It is difficult to make it "better", and the most difficult part about this is to define what is "better" in the first place. You definitely did not very well define that in your question, so I am pretty sure that you are well off using just their load balancer.

In some cases it might make sense to develop your own load balancing logic, especially if your machine usage depends on very special metrics not per se accessible to the ELB system.

Dr. Jan-Philip Gehrcke
  • 33,287
  • 14
  • 85
  • 130
1

Yes, I'd say both solutions are viable.

The upside of the second is that it allows greater customization of the load balancing logic you may want to implement (providing an improvement over ELBs round robin), dispatching requests to a server of your convenience after an initial HTTP GET request.

The downside may be on the security front. It's not clear whether security, and SSL is part of your requirements, but in case it is, the second solution forces you to handle it at the ec2 instances level, which can be inconvenient and affect each node's performance. Otherwise websocket communications may be left unsecured.

gabouy
  • 755
  • 1
  • 7
  • 16