Lead Thinking The Business of Software Development

The problem with Amazon’s Load Balancing

A year later, Amazon still haven’t fixed a fundamental problem with their load balancing product (Amazon ELB).

Amazon don’t provider customers with a fixed IP for a ELB, only a CNAME.
Since a CNAME can’t be the root of your domain (it must be an A record) – you can’t fully balance traffic to your domain.

At the moment, customers have to forward all traffic to a CNAME, from http://example.com to http://www.example.com, to load balance their domains. This introduces a single point of failure. If the server you allocate to serve traffic from the root of your domain goes down, nobody gets forwarded.

In addition, this root server isn’t load balanced, so it receives all the initial traffic to your site. This defeats ELB’s purpose somewhat.

There’s a post that’s been on Amazon’s ELB forums for about a year – with about 60 replies, this clearly is a popular ‘feature’ (or I would argue requirement). It’s a deal breaker for some.

Amazon’s response is this:

Thanks for all the feedback. We understand your concerns and supporting this feature is on our roadmap. Unfortunately, we do not have a specific timeline for its availability.

As one commentator puts it:

Serving HTTP traffic off your root domain out of your core stack is really a basic thing that any load balancing solution needs to support.

Amazon, when do you expect to launch this feature?