Distribute web traffic with Lightsail load balancers
A Lightsail load balancer distributes incoming web traffic among multiple Lightsail instances, in multiple Availability Zones. Load balancing increases the availability and fault tolerance of the application on your instances. You can add and remove instances from your Lightsail load balancer as your needs change, without disrupting the overall flow of requests to your application.
With Lightsail load balancing, we create a DNS host name and route any requests sent to this host name to a pool of target Lightsail instances. You can add as many target instances to your load balancer as you like, as long as you stay within your Lightsail account quotas for total number of instances.
Load balancer features
Lightsail load balancers offer the following features:
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HTTPS encryption — By default, Lightsail load balancers handle unencrypted (HTTP) traffic requests through port 80. Activate HTTPS encryption by attaching a validated Lightsail SSL/TLS certificate to your load balancer. This allows your load balancer to handle encrypted (HTTPS) traffic requests through port 443. For more information, see SSL/TLS certificates.
The following features are available after you activate HTTPS encryption on your load balancer:
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HTTP to HTTPS redirection — Activate HTTP to HTTPS redirection to automatically redirect HTTP requests to an HTTPS encrypted connection. For more information, see Configure HTTP to HTTPS redirection for your load balancer.
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TLS security policies — Configure a TLS security policy on your load balancer. For more information, see Configuring TLS security policies on your Amazon Lightsail load balancers.
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Health checking — By default, health checks are performed on the attached instances at the root of the web application that is running on them. The health checks monitor the health of the instances so that the load balancer can send requests only to the healthy instances. For more information, see Health checking for a Lightsail load balancer.
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Session persistence — Configure session persistence if you're storing session information locally in your website visitors' browsers. For example, you might be running a Magento e-commerce application with a shopping cart on your load-balanced Lightsail instances. If your website visitors add items to their shopping carts, and then end their sessions, when they come back, the shopping cart items will still be there if you configured session persistence. For more information, see Enable session persistence for a load balancer.
When to use load balancers
You should use a load balancer when you have a website that has occasional spikes in traffic or hosts content that can create a lot of load on an instance when many visitors are using it at once. For example, if you have an image-heavy website, you can load balance the image requests with the other page requests. That way, your pages load faster and your users are happier.
You can use a load balancer to create a highly available website. High availability refers to how long your website or application stays up over a given time period. If you have ever experienced a site outage, then a load balancer might help you have more uptime. You can use a Lightsail load balancer to make your application highly available by adding target instances that are distributed across multiple Availability Zones.
Fault tolerance is a related concept. If your site continues to function even after one of your instances or your database fails, it is considered tolerant. A load balancer can help you create a fault tolerant application or website.
Recommended applications for load balancing
Not all Lightsail applications need load balancers. If you decide to create a load-balanced application, you must configure your application first. For example, to prepare a LAMP stack application for load balancing, you should first create a centralized, dedicated database for all the target instances to read from and write to. You might also consider creating centralized media storage, such as a Lightsail object storage bucket. For more information, see Configure an instance for load balancing.
Get started using load balancers
You can create a load balancer using the Lightsail console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or the Lightsail API. You must also configure your instances for load balancing.
After you create your load balancer and attach your configured instances, you can enable HTTPS using the following topic. For more information, see Create an SSL/TLS certificate for your load balancer.
