Network Load Balancers

A Network Load Balancer serves as the single point of contact for clients. Clients send requests to the Network Load Balancer, and the Network Load Balancer sends them to targets, such as EC2 instances, in one or more Availability Zones.

To configure your Network Load Balancer, you create target groups, and then register targets with your target groups. Your Network Load Balancer is most effective if you ensure that each enabled Availability Zone has at least one registered target. You also create listeners to check for connection requests from clients and route requests from clients to the targets in your target groups.

Network Load Balancers support connections from clients over VPC peering, AWS managed VPN, AWS Direct Connect, and third-party VPN solutions.

Load balancer state

A Network Load Balancer can be in one of the following states:

IP address type

You can set the types of IP addresses that clients can use with your Network Load Balancer.

Network Load Balancers support the following IP address types:

For more information about IP address types, see Update the IP address types for your Network Load Balancer.

Connection idle timeout

For each TCP request that a client makes through a Network Load Balancer, the state of that connection is tracked. If no data is sent through the connection by either the client or target for longer than the idle timeout, the connection is no longer tracked. If a client or target sends data after the idle timeout period elapses, the client receives a TCP RST packet to indicate that the connection is no longer valid.

The default idle timeout value for TCP flows is 350 seconds, but can be updated to any value between 60-6000 seconds. Clients or targets can use TCP keepalive packets to restart the idle timeout. Keepalive packets sent to maintain TLS connections can't contain data or payload.

When a TLS listener receives a TCP keepalive packet from either a client or a target, the load balancer generates TCP keepalive packets and sends them to both the front-end and back-end connections every 20 seconds. You can't modify this behavior.

While UDP is connectionless, the load balancer maintains UDP flow state based on the source and destination IP addresses and ports. This ensures that packets that belong to the same flow are consistently sent to the same target. After the idle timeout period elapses, the load balancer considers the incoming UDP packet as a new flow and routes it to a new target. Elastic Load Balancing sets the idle timeout value for UDP flows to 120 seconds. This cannot be changed.

EC2 instances must respond to a new request within 30 seconds in order to establish a return path.

For more information, see Update idle timeout.

Load balancer attributes

You can configure your Network Load Balancer by editing its attributes. For more information, see Edit load balancer attributes.

The following are the load balancer attributes for Network Load Balancers:

Cross-zone load balancing

By default, each Network Load Balancer node distributes traffic across the registered targets in its Availability Zone only. If you turn on cross-zone load balancing, each Network Load Balancer node distributes traffic across the registered targets in all enabled Availability Zones. You can also turn on cross-zone load balancing at the target group level. For more information, see Cross-zone load balancing for target groups and Cross-zone load balancing in the Elastic Load Balancing User Guide.

DNS name

Each Network Load Balancer receives a default Domain Name System (DNS) name with the following syntax: name-id.elb.region.amazonaws.com. For example, my-load-balancer-1234567890abcdef.elb.us-east-2.amazonaws.com.

If you'd prefer to use a DNS name that is easier to remember, you can create a custom domain name and associate it with the DNS name for your Network Load Balancer. When a client makes a request using this custom domain name, the DNS server resolves it to the DNS name for your Network Load Balancer.

First, register a domain name with an accredited domain name registrar. Next, use your DNS service, such as your domain registrar, to create a DNS record to route requests to your Network Load Balancer. For more information, see the documentation for your DNS service. For example, if you use Amazon Route 53 as your DNS service, you create an alias record that points to your Network Load Balancer. For more information, see Routing traffic to an ELB load balancer in the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.

The Network Load Balancer has one IP address per enabled Availability Zone. These are the IP addresses of the Network Load Balancer nodes. The DNS name of the Network Load Balancer resolves to these addresses. For example, suppose that the custom domain name for your Network Load Balancer is example.networkloadbalancer.com. Use the following dig or nslookup command to determine the IP addresses of the Network Load Balancer nodes.

Linux or Mac

$ dig +short example.networkloadbalancer.com

Windows

C:\> nslookup example.networkloadbalancer.com

The Network Load Balancer has DNS records for its nodes. You can use DNS names with the following syntax to determine the IP addresses of the Network Load Balancer nodes: az.name-id.elb.region.amazonaws.com.

Linux or Mac

$ dig +short us-east-2b.my-load-balancer-1234567890abcdef.elb.us-east-2.amazonaws.com

Windows

C:\> nslookup us-east-2b.my-load-balancer-1234567890abcdef.elb.us-east-2.amazonaws.com

Load balancer zonal health

Network Load Balancers have zonal DNS records and IP addresses in Route 53 for each enabled availability zone. When a Network Load Balancer fails a zonal health check for a particular availability zone, its DNS record is removed from Route 53. Load balancer zonal health is monitored using the Amazon CloudWatch metric ZonalHealthStatus, giving you more insight into events that cause a fail-away to implement preventative measure to ensure optimal application availability. For more information see, Network Load Balancer metrics.

Network Load Balancers can fail zonal health checks for multiple reasons, causing them to become unhealthy. See below for common causes of unhealthy Network Load Balancers caused by failed zonal health checks.