Amazon EC2 Container Service Now Integrated with Network Load Balancer to Support High-Throughput and Direct TCP Connections with Containers

Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports the Network Load Balancer for load balancing TCP traffic to container tasks and services.

The Network Load Balancer offers a high-performance load balancing option that operates at the network connection (TCP) layer and allows you to route connections to containers running on Amazon ECS based on IP protocol data. Network Load Balancer is capable of handling millions of requests per second while maintaining ultra-low latencies. Network Load Balancer is optimized to handle sudden and volatile traffic patterns while using a single static or dynamic IP address per Availability Zone.

Previously, traffic routed through the Classic Load Balancer or Application Load Balancer was intercepted and then forwarded onto target Amazon ECS tasks or services. This meant that you could not pass source IP data to your containerized applications without configuring Proxy Protocol, or establish high-throughput direct TCP connections to your containers while taking advantage of a load balancer.

Now, you can use the Network Load Balancer to form direct TCP connections from clients to your Amazon ECS tasks and services. This allows for services that use TCP connections on static or dynamic ports to use the load balancer. Additionally, customers that do not want to terminate or offload their secure connections at the load balancer can route and pass-through traffic directly to containers, and see the original source IP information automatically in the logs of the Amazon ECS task or service.

Read more about the integration between Amazon ECS and the Network Load Balancer in the Amazon ECS Documentation. Please visit our product page for more information about Amazon EC2 Container Service.

Amazon EC2 Container Service is available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), China (Beijing). For more information on AWS regions and service, please visit here.

Learn more about the Network Load Balancer on our blog.