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Configuring AWS EC2 for Effective Cross Zone Load Balancing

By Raju Porandla,

Here at Innominds, we like exploring and testing. We like taking our findings and sharing them with each other so as to always be learning. That said, we wish to share with you some of the great findings we recently conducted involving AWSEC2. Read on to hear more.

Software performance testing is a practice to determine the responsiveness and stability of a system under particular workload. There is nothing new about that. And we are all aware that load testing, one of the many different varieties of testing, is extremely important in our industry.  Recently here at Innominds, while performing load tests on an application, we identified an issue with load balancing on AWS EC2 - the distribution of requests was not even across all available instances of an application under the selected EC2 load balancer. The number of requests sent to some of the instances was huge, leading to high resource utilization and errors on those instances whereas few other instances were underutilized.

Here are 3 of the usual solutions that could be opted in such a scenario:

  1. Select “Application Load Balancer” instead of “Classic Load Balancer”, which will by default distribute the load across all the instances in available zones
  2. Even if “Classic Load Balancer” is selected, ensure to have equal number of instances in each Available Zone for higher fault tolerance
  3. Enable “Cross-zone load balancing” on “Classic Load Balancers” from AWS settings. This enables the requests to be distributed across all instances, even though the available instance count is not same in all the zones which are available

We opted for the third solution and enabled “Cross-zone load balancing”.

The load balancing worked properly and resource utilization ended up even across all the instances, thereby improving the performance of the application. Want to read more information on load balancing with other Cloud Service providers?  Click here.

Load balancing with AWS EC2 other Cloud Services

 

Here at Innominds, we enjoy helping our customers with the end-to-end software testing needs on all applications and across all platforms. If you have a unique situation or issue and need some advice or help, contact us. We look forward to helping.

Topics: Quality Engineering

Raju Porandla

Raju Porandla

Principal Engineer, Quality Engineering

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