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  5. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Squid

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Squid

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Squid
Squid
Stacks101
Followers205
Votes17
GitHub Stars2.7K
Forks594
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Stacks12.8K
Followers8.8K
Votes59

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

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Squid

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Squid are both popular solutions for load balancing in web applications. However, they have key differences that set them apart.

  1. Scalability: AWS ELB is a highly scalable service that automatically scales its capacity based on incoming traffic, ensuring a seamless experience for users. On the other hand, Squid load balancing requires manual configuration for scaling, and it may not handle sudden spikes in traffic as effectively as ELB.

  2. Application Awareness: ELB operates at the application layer of the OSI model, performing advanced health checks and maintaining session affinity. It can intelligently distribute traffic based on specific application metrics, allowing for more granular load balancing configurations. In contrast, Squid is primarily a forward proxy caching server and lacks the advanced application awareness of ELB.

  3. Service Integration: ELB integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as Auto Scaling and Route 53, providing a comprehensive load balancing solution within the AWS ecosystem. Conversely, Squid is a standalone solution that requires additional configuration and setup to integrate with other services.

  4. Flexibility: ELB offers multiple load balancing algorithms, such as round-robin, least connection, and IP hash, allowing for flexible load balancing configurations. Additionally, ELB supports multiple protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP, making it suitable for a wide range of applications. Squid, on the other hand, primarily functions as a caching server and may not offer the same level of flexibility in load balancing algorithms and protocol support.

  5. Monitoring and Metrics: ELB provides detailed monitoring and metrics through AWS CloudWatch, allowing you to gain insights into your application's performance and troubleshoot issues. Squid, on the other hand, may not offer as comprehensive monitoring capabilities out of the box and may require additional configuration for obtaining detailed metrics.

  6. Managed Service vs Self-hosted: ELB is a managed service provided by AWS, meaning that the underlying infrastructure and maintenance tasks are handled by AWS. This eliminates the need for manual management and reduces operational overhead. Squid, on the other hand, requires self-hosting and manual configuration and maintenance, which may require more effort and expertise.

In summary, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) offers scalability, advanced application awareness, seamless integration with other AWS services, flexibility, comprehensive monitoring, and reduces operational overhead with its managed service model. Squid, in contrast, may require manual configuration for scaling, lacks advanced application awareness, requires additional setup to integrate with other services, and may not offer the same level of monitoring and convenience as ELB.

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Detailed Comparison

Squid
Squid
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

Squid reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

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.

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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
GitHub Stars
2.7K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
594
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
101
Stacks
12.8K
Followers
205
Followers
8.8K
Votes
17
Votes
59
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 4
    Easy to config
  • 2
    Cluster
  • 2
    Very Fast
  • 2
    Web application accelerator
  • 1
    ICP
Pros
  • 48
    Easy
  • 8
    ASG integration
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 1
    Coding
  • 0
    SSL offloading
Integrations
No integrations available
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2

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

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.

Varnish

Varnish

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.

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.

Section

Section

Edge Compute Platform gives Dev and Ops engineers the access and control they need to run compute workloads on a distributed edge.

Fly

Fly

Deploy apps through our global load balancer with minimal shenanigans. All Fly-enabled applications get free SSL certificates, accept traffic through our global network of datacenters, and encrypt all traffic from visitors through to application servers.

Nuster

Nuster

nuster is a high performance HTTP proxy cache server and RESTful NoSQL cache server based on HAProxy.

Envoy

Envoy

Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.

Hipache

Hipache

Hipache is a distributed proxy designed to route high volumes of http and websocket traffic to unusually large numbers of virtual hosts, in a highly dynamic topology where backends are added and removed several times per second. It is particularly well-suited for PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and other environments that are both business-critical and multi-tenant.

node-http-proxy

node-http-proxy

node-http-proxy is an HTTP programmable proxying library that supports websockets. It is suitable for implementing components such as proxies and load balancers.

Modern DDoS Protection & Edge Security Platform

Modern DDoS Protection & Edge Security Platform

Protect and accelerate your apps with Trafficmind’s global edge — DDoS defense, WAF, API security, CDN/DNS, 99.99% uptime and 24/7 expert team.

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