Building a Scalable Infrastructure with AWS EC2 and Load Balancing

As the number of users accessing our web application grows, we need to ensure that our infrastructure can handle the increased traffic. AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and load balancing can help us achieve this scalability. In this article, we will explore how to build a scalable infrastructure using AWS EC2 and load balancing.

EC2

Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud. With EC2, we can launch virtual machines, called instances, and run applications on them. EC2 provides a wide variety of instance types, which are optimized for different workloads. For example, we can choose an instance type that has more CPU power or more memory, depending on what our application requires.

To create an EC2 instance, we need to follow these steps:

1. Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that has the operating system and software we need.
2. Choose an instance type that matches our application's requirements.
3. Configure the instance by selecting things like the network settings, security groups, and user data.
4. Launch the instance, and connect to it using SSH or RDP.

Load Balancing

Load balancing is the process of distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers. Load balancers can help us achieve high availability for our application by ensuring that traffic is redirected to healthy servers. In addition, load balancing can help us achieve scalability by allowing us to add more servers to handle increased traffic.

AWS provides two types of load balancers: Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers. Application Load Balancers are used for HTTP/HTTPS traffic, while Network Load Balancers are used for TCP/UDP traffic. In this article, we will focus on Application Load Balancers.

To create an Application Load Balancer, we need to follow these steps:

1. Choose the VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) and subnets where the load balancer will be deployed.
2. Choose the security groups that will be associated with the load balancer.
3. Configure the listeners, which specify the protocols and ports that the load balancer will listen on.
4. Configure the target groups, which specify the instances that the load balancer will distribute traffic to.
5. Configure health checks to ensure that only healthy instances receive traffic.
6. Review and create the load balancer.

Scaling

Now that we have an EC2 instance and a load balancer, we can scale our infrastructure to handle increased traffic. There are two ways to scale our infrastructure: vertical scaling and horizontal scaling.

Vertical scaling involves adding more resources, such as CPU or memory, to our existing EC2 instance. This can be done by stopping the instance, changing its instance type, and then starting it again. Vertical scaling is useful when our application requires more resources, but can only run on a single instance.

Horizontal scaling involves adding more instances to our infrastructure, and distributing traffic across them using a load balancer. This can be done by launching more EC2 instances, and adding them to our target group. Horizontal scaling is useful when our application can handle requests from multiple instances, and can benefit from increased availability and scalability.

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored how to build a scalable infrastructure using AWS EC2 and load balancing. We have learned how to create an EC2 instance, a load balancer, and how to scale our infrastructure vertically and horizontally. By following these best practices, we can ensure that our application can handle increased traffic, and provide our users with a reliable and responsive experience.