Application Load Balancer (ALB) is an Alibaba Cloud service that runs at the application layer and is optimized to balance traffic over HTTP, HTTPS, and Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC). ALB is highly elastic and can scale on demand to process large volumes of Layer 7 traffic. ALB also provides an availability SLA of up to 99.995%. ALB supports complex routing. ALB is integrated with other cloud-native services and is designed to serve as an ingress gateway to manage inbound traffic on Alibaba Cloud.
Why ALB?
As a cloud-native ingress gateway on Alibaba Cloud, Application Load Balancer (ALB) is intended for Layer 7 load balancing over HTTP, HTTPS, and QUIC and provides advanced routing features. For more information about ALB Ingresses, see ALB Ingress overview and ALB Ingress features.
Application layer elasticity
ALB is intended for Layer 7 load balancing and provides domain names and virtual IP addresses to handle large amounts of network traffic at multiple levels. ALB distributes network traffic across groups of backend servers and automatically scales in response to the volume of inbound traffic. This not only improves the availability of your applications, but also helps prevent service interruptions caused by single points of failure (SPOFs). ALB supports custom cross-zone deployment and elastic scaling across zones to prevent resource insufficiency in individual zones.
Advanced protocols
ALB supports HTTP, HTTPS, and QUIC and can process a heavy load of network traffic. You can use ALB to provide fast and secure connections to mobile Internet applications such as real-time audio and video applications, interactive streaming applications, and online game applications. ALB supports Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) to facilitate efficient communication among microservices through APIs.
Content-based routing
ALB can route network traffic to different backend servers based on the request content such as the path, HTTP header, query string, HTTP request method, cookie, and source IP address. ALB also supports advanced configurations such as redirects, rewrites, and custom HTTPS headers.
Security and reliability
ALB supports DDoS mitigation and can be integrated with Web Application Firewall (WAF) to provide more security features. In addition, ALB supports end-to-end HTTPS encryption, custom security policies, and efficient encryption protocols such as TLS 1.3. ALB protects your business-critical services and complies with the Zero Trust security framework.
Cloud-native
As more and more cloud-native services are developed, a growing number of customers in the Internet, finance, and enterprise sectors choose to deploy their applications in the cloud or migrate their existing business systems to the cloud. As a cloud-native ingress gateway for Alibaba Cloud, ALB is deeply integrated with Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), Serverless App Engine (SAE), Function Compute, and Kubernetes.
Flexible billing
ALB uses elastic IP addresses (EIPs) and EIP bandwidth plans to provide Internet-facing services and supports flexible billing for Internet data transfer. ALB also supports the pay-by-LCU metering method, which allows you to pay only for the resources that you use.
Performance metrics
ALB supports the Dynamic IP and Static IP modes. The performance of an ALB instance varies based on the IP mode.
The performance metrics of an ALB instance vary only based on the IP mode of the ALB instance, and are not affected by the edition of the ALB instance.
IP mode | Maximum number of queries per second (QPS) | Maximum number of connections per second (CPS) | Maximum number of concurrent connections | Maximum private bandwidth | Maximum Internet bandwidth |
Dynamic IP | 1,000,000 | 1,000,000 | 10,000,000 | 100 Gbps | 4000 Mbps Note The sum of the maximum bandwidth of all pay-by-data-transfer EIPs in each Alibaba Cloud account in each region cannot exceed 5 Gbit/s. For more information, see the bandwidth limits in Overview. If you want to use larger bandwidth, purchase an EIP bandwidth plan. For more information, see Create an EIP bandwidth plan. |
IP mode | Maximum QPS | Maximum CPS | Maximum number of concurrent connections | Maximum private bandwidth | Maximum Internet bandwidth |
Static IP | 100,000 | 100,000 | 1,000,000 | 10 Gbps | 400 Mbps Note The sum of the maximum bandwidth of all pay-by-data-transfer EIPs in each Alibaba Cloud account in each region cannot exceed 5 Gbit/s. For more information, see the bandwidth limits in Overview. If you want to use larger bandwidth, purchase an EIP bandwidth plan. For more information, see Create an EIP bandwidth plan. |
In static IP mode, you can use CNAME records or A records to provide services, and an ALB instance deployed across two zones supports up to 100,000 QPS. In dynamic IP mode, you can use CNAME records to provide services, and an ALB instance deployed across two zones supports up to 1,000,000 QPS.
ALB supports multi-zone deployment. If the current region has two or more zones, you must select at least two zones to ensure high availability. If you select multiple zones for an ALB instance, you are not charged additional fees.
ALB components
Term | Description |
Instance | ALB provides ultra-high Layer 7 processing capabilities and can increase the service capacity of your applications by distributing network traffic across different backend servers. Each ALB instance supports up to one million QPS. |
Listener | A listener is the smallest configurable unit of ALB. Listeners check for requests over the protocols and ports that you configure. For example, you can configure a listener of ALB to process HTTP requests on port 80. You must add at least one listener to each ALB instance before the ALB instance can distribute network traffic. You can add at most 50 listeners to each ALB instance to distribute network traffic for different workloads. |
Forwarding rule | ALB distributes requests to backend servers in one or more server groups based on forwarding rules. ALB provides advanced routing features. In addition to the basic routing features, you can specify conditions such as the HTTP header, cookie, and HTTP method in a forwarding rule to route network traffic to different backend servers. |
Server group | Backend servers can be organized into logical groups (also known as server groups) to which requests are distributed. Each server group contains one or more backend servers that process requests distributed by ALB. Server groups of ALB are independent of ALB. You can associate a server group with different ALB instances. You can specify up to 1,000 backend servers in each server group. ALB supports multiple types of backend servers. For example, you can specify Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, elastic container instances, and elastic network interfaces (ENIs) as backend servers. |
Health check | ALB checks the availability of backend servers by performing health checks. If a backend server is declared unhealthy, ALB does not forward requests to the backend server. ALB supports flexible health check configurations. For example, you can specify the protocol, port, and thresholds for health checks. ALB provides health check templates that can be applied to different server groups. |
Types of ALB instances
Alibaba Cloud provides Internet-facing and internal-facing ALB instances. You can specify the type of ALB instance based on your business requirements. Whether EIP Internet Shared Bandwidth instances plans are used is based on the specified type of ALB instance.
Term | Description |
EIP bandwidth plan | Internet Shared Bandwidth instances allow you to share and transfer bandwidth resources within the same region. Internet Shared Bandwidth instances support multiple metering methods such as pay-by-bandwidth and pay-by-enhanced-95th-percentile. You can use Internet Shared Bandwidth instances to reduce Internet bandwidth costs. Internet-facing ALB instances use EIPs aInternet Shared Bandwidth instancesans that support the pay-by-bandwidth and pay-by-enhanced-95th-percentile metering methods to provide Internet-facing services. |
Domain name | A domain name that can be accessed over the Internet or private networks and can be resolved to the virtual IP address of an ALB instance. You can also create a CNAME record to map a readable domain name to the domain name of ALB. For more information, see Configure a CNAME record. |
EIP | EIPs are required only by Internet-facing ALB instances. You do not need to associate EIPs with internal-facing ALB instances. An EIP is an IP address that ALB uses to provide services over the Internet. You can associate multiple EIPs with an Internet-facing ALB instance. To ensure high availability, an Internet-facing ALB instance must use at least two EIPs in different zones to provide services. |
Virtual IP address | Virtual IP addresses of ALB are used to receive and forward requests. Each virtual IP address is a private IP address that belongs to a virtual private cloud (VPC). |
Activate ALB
Click the following button to go to the ALB buy page.
Deploy and maintain ALB instances
After you create an Alibaba Cloud account, you can deploy and manage ALB instances in the following ways:
ALB console: a web interface that you can use to manage your ALB service. You can create, use, or release ALB instances in the console. For more information, see Create an ALB instance.
Alibaba Cloud SDKs: SDKs for Java, Go, Python, and other programming languages.
OpenAPI Explorer: allows you to retrieve and call API operations, and dynamically generate SDK sample code.
Terraform: uses configuration files to call computing resources of Alibaba Cloud and other platforms that support Terraform. Terraform is an open source tool that implements version control.