Comparison of Elastic Load Balancing Products

You can select the appropriate load balancer based on your application needs. If you need
flexible application management, we recommend that you use an Application Load
Balancer. If extreme performance and static IP is needed for your application, we
recommend that you use a Network Load Balancer. If you have an existing application that
was built within the EC2-Classic network, then you should use a Classic Load Balancer.

Application Network Classic

Feature Load Load Load
Balancer Balancer Balancer

TCP, SSL,
HTTP,
Protocols TCP HTTP,
HTTPS
HTTPS

EC2-
Platforms VPC VPC Classic,
VPC

Health checks ✔ ✔ ✔

CloudWatch metrics ✔ ✔ ✔

Logging ✔ ✔ ✔

Zonal fail-over ✔ ✔ ✔

Connection draining (deregistration delay) ✔ ✔ ✔

Load Balancing to multiple ports on the same

✔ ✔
instance

WebSockets ✔ ✔

IP addresses as targets ✔ ✔

Load balancer deletion protection ✔ ✔

Path-Based Routing ✔

Host-Based Routing ✔

Native HTTP/2 ✔

Configurable idle connection timeout ✔ ✔

Cross-zone load balancing ✔ ✔ ✔

SSL offloading ✔ ✔

Server Name Indication (SNI) ✔

Sticky sessions ✔ ✔

Back-end server encryption ✔ ✔

Static IP ✔

Elastic IP address ✔

Preserve Source IP address ✔

Resource-based IAM
✔ ✔ ✔
permissions

Tag-based IAM permissions ✔ ✔

Slow start ✔

User authentication ✔

Redirects ✔

Fixed response ✔