How to Configure a Load Balancer
Set up load balancing for high availability and horizontal scaling of your web application.
What You'll Learn
This intermediate-level guide walks you through how to configure a load balancer step by step. Estimated time: 10 min.
Step 1: Choose your load balancer type
Select between application load balancers for HTTP routing, network load balancers for TCP performance, or CDN-based edge load balancing.
Step 2: Configure health checks
Set up health check endpoints and configure the load balancer to route traffic only to healthy backend instances.
Step 3: Set up routing rules
Configure path-based routing, host-based routing, and weighted traffic distribution for your application architecture.
Step 4: Enable SSL termination
Terminate SSL at the load balancer to offload encryption from backend servers and simplify certificate management.
Step 5: Configure monitoring
Set up load balancer metrics, access logs, and alerts for unhealthy targets, high latency, and error rate spikes.
Frequently Asked Questions
When do I need a load balancer?▾
When you have multiple backend instances, need zero-downtime deployments, or want to distribute traffic across availability zones for high availability.
ALB, NLB, or Nginx?▾
ALB for HTTP/HTTPS applications with path routing. NLB for TCP/UDP with ultra-low latency. Nginx for self-managed or on-premises load balancing.
How do I handle sticky sessions?▾
Use cookie-based session affinity when your app requires server-side sessions. Better approach: make your app stateless using external session stores like Redis.