Deciphering Load Balancer Strategies: Path-Based vs Host-Based Routing 🌐 (2024)

FAQs

What is the difference between host-based and path-based routing? ›

Path-Based Routing: This method routes traffic based on the URL path. For example, traffic to example.com/app1 could be routed to a different target group than traffic to example.com/app2 . Host-Based Routing: This strategy directs traffic based on the domain name of the request.

Path-based routing is one of the unique features offered by Application Load Balancer. Path-based routing is also referred to as URL-based routing. The Application load balancer will forward the requests to the specific targets based on the Rules configured in the load balancer.

Routing makes a decision on where to forward something – a packet, an application request, an approval in your business workflow. Load balancing distributes something (packets, requests, approval) across a set of resources designed to process that something. You really can't (shouldn't) substitute one for the other.

Network route—The destination is a network. The subnet mask is less than 32 bits. Host route—The destination is a host. The subnet mask is 32 bits.

While a network-based firewall examines data packet headers and block addresses or ports, host-based firewall functions act as an independent safeguard. Several layers of protection help to secure endpoints against a diverse range of threats.

ELBs are intended to load balance across EC2 instances in a 'single' region. Whereas DNS load-balancing (Route 53) is intended to help balance traffic 'across' regions. Route53 policies like geolocation may help direct traffic to preferred regions, then ELBs route between instances within one region.

If you need to load balance HTTP requests, we recommend you use the Application Load Balancer (ALB). For network/transport protocols (layer4 – TCP, UDP) load balancing, and for extreme performance/low latency applications we recommend using Network Load Balancer.

URL Path Based Routing allows you to route traffic to backend server pools based on URL Paths of the request. One of the scenarios is to route requests for different content types to different backend server pools.

Which load balancer is faster? ›

An NLB is best for high-performance, low-latency, and scalable network-level balancing. Applications that distribute traffic on the transport layer use NLBs, especially considering its reliability.

Routers are OSI layer3 devices whereas there are many types of load balancers throughout the OSI stack. I think within the context of this thread, where OP is asking general questions about how a request is directed end to end, a load balancer can be considered a router.

Load balancing is the practice of distributing traffic across more than one server to improve performance and availability. Organizations use different forms of load balancing to speed up both websites and private networks.

Content-based Routing

If your application is composed of several individual services, an Application Load Balancer can route a request to a service based on the content of the request such as Host field, Path URL, HTTP header, HTTP method, Query string or Source IP address.

Note: This feature isn't available for other load balancer types, including Classic Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, or Gateway Load Balancer. To establish path-based routing on your Application Load Balancer, complete these steps: Create a target group. Configure listener rules.

An Uniform Resource Locator or URL is the unique address of a file on the Internet. An URL is composed by the protocol, the host name (that corresponds to the host's Document Root on the host filesystem), and the relative path of the file to be loaded (with respect to the Document Root).

In a policy-based VPN configuration, the action must be permit and must include a tunnel. Route-based VPNs support the exchange of dynamic routing information through VPN tunnels. You can enable an instance of a dynamic routing protocol, such as OSPF, on an st0 interface that is bound to a VPN tunnel.

Routing by hostname is a mechanism for isolating API services by giving each API its own hostname; for example, service-a.api.example.com or service-a.example.com .

(1) A system controlled by a central or main computer. A host-based system may refer to a hierarchical communications system controlled by a central computer. See host. (2) An operation that is performed by software in the computer rather than in a peripheral device.