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  5. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Rancher

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Rancher

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Rancher
Rancher
Stacks952
Followers1.5K
Votes644
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Stacks12.8K
Followers8.8K
Votes59

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Rancher: What are the differences?

What is AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)? Automatically distribute your incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.

What is Rancher? Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service. Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Rancher are primarily classified as "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" and "Container" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) are:

  • Distribution of requests to Amazon EC2 instances (servers) in multiple Availability Zones so that the risk of overloading one single instance is minimized. And if an entire Availability Zone goes offline, Elastic Load Balancing routes traffic to instances in other Availability Zones.
  • Continuous monitoring of the health of Amazon EC2 instances registered with the load balancer so that requests are sent only to the healthy instances. If an instance becomes unhealthy, Elastic Load Balancing stops sending traffic to that instance and spreads the load across the remaining healthy instances.
  • Support for end-to-end traffic encryption on those networks that use secure (HTTPS/SSL) connections.

On the other hand, Rancher provides the following key features:

  • Manage Hosts, Deploy Containers, Monitor Resources
  • User Management & Collaboration
  • Native Docker APIs & Tools

"Easy" is the primary reason why developers consider AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) over the competitors, whereas "Easy to use" was stated as the key factor in picking Rancher.

Rancher is an open source tool with 11.8K GitHub stars and 1.31K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Rancher's open source repository on GitHub.

Coursera, 9GAG, and Quora are some of the popular companies that use AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), whereas Rancher is used by Packet, Redox Engine, and VCCloud. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) has a broader approval, being mentioned in 711 company stacks & 301 developers stacks; compared to Rancher, which is listed in 88 company stacks and 35 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Rancher
Rancher
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.

Manage Hosts, Deploy Containers, Monitor Resources;User Management & Collaboration;Native Docker APIs & Tools;Monitoring and Logging;Connect Containers, Manage Disks, Deploy Load Balancers;Docker App Catalog; Included Kubernetes Distribution;Included Docker Swarm Distribution; Included Mesos Distribution;Infrastructure Management
Distribution of requests to Amazon EC2 instances (servers) in multiple Availability Zones so that the risk of overloading one single instance is minimized. And if an entire Availability Zone goes offline, Elastic Load Balancing routes traffic to instances in other Availability Zones.;Continuous monitoring of the health of Amazon EC2 instances registered with the load balancer so that requests are sent only to the healthy instances. If an instance becomes unhealthy, Elastic Load Balancing stops sending traffic to that instance and spreads the load across the remaining healthy instances.;Support for end-to-end traffic encryption on those networks that use secure (HTTPS/SSL) connections.;The ability to take over the encryption and decryption work from the Amazon EC2 instances, and manage it centrally on the load balancer.;Support for the sticky session feature, which is the ability to "stick" user sessions to specific Amazon EC2 instances.;Association of the load balancer with your domain name. Because the load balancer is the only computer that is exposed to the Internet, you don’t have to create and manage public domain names for the instances that the load balancer manages. You can point the instance's domain records at the load balancer instead and scale as needed (either adding or removing capacity) without having to update the records with each scaling activity.;When used in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), support for creation and management of security groups associated with your load balancer to provide additional networking and security options.;Supports use of both the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).
Statistics
Stacks
952
Stacks
12.8K
Followers
1.5K
Followers
8.8K
Votes
644
Votes
59
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 103
    Easy to use
  • 79
    Open source and totally free
  • 63
    Multi-host docker-compose support
  • 58
    Simple
  • 58
    Load balancing and health check included
Cons
  • 10
    Hosting Rancher can be complicated
Pros
  • 48
    Easy
  • 8
    ASG integration
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 1
    Coding
  • 0
    SSL offloading
Integrations
Jenkins
Jenkins
Datadog
Datadog
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Docker Compose
Docker Compose
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
GitHub
GitHub
Docker
Docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Drone.io
Drone.io
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2

What are some alternatives to Rancher, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

HAProxy

HAProxy

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

Docker Compose

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Portainer

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Traefik

Traefik

A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

Codefresh

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

CAST.AI

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

k3s

k3s

Certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Supports something as small as a Raspberry Pi or as large as an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server.

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