SYSTEM Cited by 2 sources
AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB)¶
Definition¶
AWS Application Load Balancer is the L7 (HTTP/HTTPS) load balancer offering in the AWS Elastic Load Balancing family. It performs TLS termination (typically with an ACM-issued cert), HTTP/2 upgrade, content-based routing (path, host, header, query), and forwards to target groups that can be EC2 instances, IP addresses, Lambda functions, or ECS tasks.
Seen in¶
- sources/2026-05-12-aws-building-hybrid-multi-tenant-architecture-for-stateful-services
— canonical wiki instance of ALB as the per-tenant L7 router
for a production stateful multi-tenant SaaS. AWS ad-serving
platform runs one ALB per infra group with per-tenant listener
rules (path-based
/tenant-a/*or HTTP-header-based) forwarding to per-tenant target groups registered against dedicated ECS clusters. Explicit ALB-quota disclosure (100 target groups per LB, 5 target groups per listener rule, 20 rules per ALB) derives the canonical ~50-tenants-per-infra-group capacity ceiling. First wiki instance of ALB metrics (TargetResponseTime,HTTPCode_Target_5XX_Count,RequestCount) as per-tenant observability signals that fall out naturally when target groups are per-tenant. See patterns/alb-path-routing-per-tenant (production-tenant sibling of patterns/shared-alb-path-based-multi-cluster-routing). -
— ALB sits in front of Skipper in Zalando's Kubernetes stack; the ALB + ACM cert + listener rules are provisioned automatically by the Kubernetes Ingress Controller for AWS whenever an Ingress is applied.
-
sources/2026-04-27-aws-deloitte-optimizes-eks-environment-provisioning-with-vcluster — One ALB fronts 50+ vCluster virtual Kubernetes clusters, collapsing what used to be 1 ALB + 1 Route 53 record + 1 ACM cert per environment into a single shared stack. Deloitte uses the
alb.ingress.kubernetes.io/group.name: vclusterIngressClassParams to tell the AWS Load Balancer Controller to aggregate all matching Ingress objects (from any of the 50+ virtual clusters) into the same ALB listener with path-based rules (/app1,/app2, …). First canonical wiki instance of the ALB-as-multi-tenant-ingress-aggregator role; see patterns/shared-alb-path-based-multi-cluster-routing for the full config pattern including per-vcluster Ingress annotations and thegroup.orderprecedence mechanism.
Comparable systems¶
- AWS Network Load Balancer — L4, higher throughput, lower per-connection overhead, used when you don't need HTTP-level routing.
- Classic ELB — legacy, deprecated for new deployments.