Cloud Load Balancers vs. Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
Cloud Load Balancers vs. Dedicated Load Balancer
Support
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
To receive 24x7x365 phone/chat support from Amazon EC2, you pay the greater of $100 per month or 10% (scaling down) of your ELB costs. That means your support cost goes up with your ELB usage and isn't directly related to the amount of support you use.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers
Cloud load balancers are backed by the legendary Fanatical Support® you can only get from Rackspace. Included with cloud load balancers, customers get:
- Chat/phone/ticket support available 24x7x365
- 99.99% Uptime Service Level Guarantee
Dedicated Public IP Address
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
When you create an ELB instance, you get a public DNS name; however, it's not very user friendly and you will want to create a CNAME record in DNS to redirect to your URL. If you delete your ELB instance and create it again, you'll need to update your CNAME record since you got a new public DNS name. This isn't exactly simple or intuitive.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers
Do you want to use A-records to map domain names and web server IPs? A dedicated IP address allows for use as a root record for a zone. This gives customers more flexible and natural deployment options.
Access Control List (ACL)
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
Access control list feature is not available.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers
For centralized access control, the Rackspace cloud load balancer has an ACL-based security model, which allows users to define what hosts and networks have access to a load balanced service.
Connection Logging
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
Connection logging feature is not available. Customers must find an alternative method for aggregating log data from multiple backend nodes.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers
To simplify log management, the connection logging feature allows for Apache-style access logs (for HTTP-based protocol traffic) or connection and transfer logging (for all other traffic) to be sent to your Cloud Files account. Logs are sorted, aggregated, and delivered hourly to Cloud Files™, which is perfect for users who need to perform tuning, inspection, or analysis.
Connection Throttling
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
Connection throttling feature is not available.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers
As an additional security feature, Rackspace cloud load balancers have a connection throttling feature which imposes limits on the number of connections per IP address to help mitigate malicious or abusive traffic to your application or website.
Selectable Algorithms
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
ELB utilizes only a non-configurable round robin load balancing algorithm.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers
Customize the behavior of your cloud load balancer with selectable algorithms, including: random, round robin, weighted round robin, least connections, and weighted least connections.
Advanced HTTP Health Monitoring
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
While HTTP and TCP-based health monitors are available, ELB does not permit users to define an acceptable status code or body regular expression to match against.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers can use synthetic transaction monitoring to inspect an HTTP response code and body content to ensure the application or site is healthy. In the event that a node is not responding correctly, it will be removed from rotation until the health check determines the node is functioning as expected.
Shared IPs
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
ELB does not permit users to share a single IP address across multiple load balancers, but does allow for a single load balancer to support multiple port configurations.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers
Shared IPs gives you the ability to share IP addresses with other load balancers on the same account. Shared IPs facilitates easier management and better IP utilization of load balancer configuration.
Internal Virtual IPs
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
All ELBs are configured as public virtual IPs. An internal virtual IP option is not available.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers
Internal virtual IPs allow you to load balance traffic without traversing the public Internet. This feature allows you to load balance internal services, without being penalized with external bandwidth charges.
SSL Termination
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
Supports SSL termination at the load balancer.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers
Supports SSL termination at the load balancer.
Rackspace offers both dedicated load balancing devices and cloud load balancing. If you want to know which solution is right for you, review the following questions:
If you answer "Yes" to one or more of the following questions,
a Rackspace Cloud Load Balancer may be the best solution for you:
- Do you have two or more Cloud Servers that need load balancing?
- Do you require a load balancing solution without long-term commitments?
- Do you require a high-bandwidth, high-throughput load balancing solution?
- Do you require on-demand (via control panel or API) access to provision and configure your load balancing solution?
If you answer "Yes" to one or more of the following questions,
a dedicated load balancer may be the best solution for you:
- Do you require a transparent load balancing solution where the backend nodes see the source IP of the client?
- Do you have long-running processes across the load balancer where requests do not generate a response in less than 30 seconds?
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