Creating a load balancer

AWS offers two kinds of load balancers:

• Classic load balancer
• Application load balancer

We're going to focus on the application load balancer. It's effectively an upgraded, second generation of the ELB service, and it offers a lot more functionality than the classic load balancer. HTTP/2 and WebSockets are supported natively, for example. The hourly rate also happens to be cheaper.

Note

Application load balancers do not support layer-4 load balancing. For this kind of functionality, you'll need to use a classic load balancer.

How to do it...

1. Open up your text editor and create a new CloudFormation template. We're going to require a VPC ID and some subnet IDs as Parameters. Add them to your template like this:

      AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09' 
      Parameters: 
        VPCID: 
          Type: AWS::EC2::VPC::Id 
          Description: VPC where load balancer and instance will launch 
        SubnetIDs: 
          Type: List<AWS::EC2::Subnet::Id> 
      ...