AWS Makes A Play For Application Load Balancing

Another week, another new cloud service from Amazon in sight. The time around AWS is ready to move into the dynamic filed of networking, with some enhanced capabilities for its application load balancer.

In what is clearly a bid to target hybrid workloads that seem to be all the rage these days.

It was actually a year or so ago that Amazon added Application Load Balancer to its portfolio, which was designed to move routing capabilities up the stack to the application layer in order to appeal to modern workloads.

Now, the cloud giant has extended these capabilities beyond its datacenters.

They are now available for AWS hybrid cloud applications, as well as disaster recovery and migrations.

And while the Application Load Balancer could previously only route traffic to Elastic Compute Cloud instances, primarily for microservices that ran in containers on AWS, customers can now use it to route traffic directly to their private datacenters.

This can easily be done via an IP address.

A single instance can actually host more than one service, and it can also spread traffic to web servers or databases on multiple Virtual Private Clouds within a region.

That said, this new capability looks to be specifically designed for AWS hybrid cloud applications, and will help the cloud provider address the needs of users that want to maintain a presence on premises.

This strategy shift from AWS is not at all surprising, keeping in view the fact that VMware Cloud on AWS just became available a few days ago. It basically represented the largest foray from Amazon Web Services yet to support workloads beyond its own datacenters.

These enhanced application load balancing capabilities that are perfectly at ease with containerized workloads are sure to help ease the move to the cloud for enterprise customers.

Thoughts?