Elastic Load Balancing: Network Load Balancer now supports load balancing to IP addresses as targets for AWS and on-premises resources

We are pleased to announce that Network Load Balancers can now distribute traffic to AWS resources using their IP addresses as targets in addition to the instance IDs. You can now also load balance to resources in on-premises locations reachable over AWS Direct Connect and resources in EC2-Classic. Load balancing across AWS and on-premises resources using the same load balancer makes it easy for you to migrate-to-cloud, burst-to-cloud, or failover-to-cloud.

Prior to this launch, when using an instance ID as a target, an EC2 instance could only receive traffic from the load balancer on its primary IP address and primary network interface. This limits hosting multiple applications on the same instance where each application requires different IP address, network interface, or security group. Using IP addresses as targets removes this limitation as the load balancer can route to multiple IP addresses and network interfaces on the same instance. Load balancing using IP addresses also provides flexibility with microservice based architectures, where each application target can now use a known port instead of a random port simplifying inter-application communication. This feature also enables load balancing to your on-premises resources thereby supporting hybrid architectures.

Load balancing using IP addresses is available today for existing and new Network Load Balancers in all public AWS regions except the China (Beijing) region. You can get started using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDK.

To learn more, please visit the Target Groups section and the Register Targets section from the Network Load Balancer User Guide.