AWS just dropped a bunch of new features for the ALB and NLB load balancers - must be trying to get the small stuff out of the way before re:Invent!

Application Load Balancer (ALB) changes today:

  • Weighted Target Groups - distribute traffic across back-ends according to weighting values - this should be very useful for canary deployments.
  • Least Outstanding Requests - a balancing algorithm that can more intelligently direct traffic by sending requests to the back-end with the least active requests

Network Load Balancer (NLB) changes today:

  • Subnet Expansion - You can now add new subnets to an existing NLB.
  • Private IP Address Selection - You can now enter the specific private IP address that you want
  • Shared VPC Support - NLB’s can now reside in shared VPC’s. This will come into play for with a multi-account or multi-VPC architecture where you want to share services across VPC’s

Our favorite change here is the weighted target groups. For non-K8S workloads this should reduce the amount of custom scripting involved in implementing canary deployments - more undifferentiated heavy lifting goes away.

Read the full update.