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

We are pleased to announce that Application Load Balancers can now distribute traffic to AWS resources using their IP addresses as targets in addition to the instance IDs. You can also load balance to resources outside the VPC hosting the load balancer using their IP addresses as targets. This includes resources in peered VPCs, EC2-Classic, and on-premises locations reachable over AWS Direct Connect or a VPN connection. 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 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 all existing and new Application Load Balancers in all regions. You can get started using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDK.

To learn more, see the following resources:

• AWS Blog
• The “Target Group” section and the “Register Targets” section of the Application Load Balancer User Guide