Pricing for AWS Application Load Balancer VS Nginx load balancer setup on Amazon EC2 Instance

Question

My question here is either I have to go for AWS Application load balancer or nginx or haproxy load balancer setup on AWS EC2 instance? I am more concern about pricing and can not afford downtime.

Need to make up a couple of load scenarios - low, medium, high and work out a price point for each in aws appication load balancer vs nginx on ec2 instance.

Can anyone suggest best use cases based on your experience?

Answer 1

EC2:

1. Maintaining is up to you (updates, security etc.).
2. Autoscaling is up to you.
3. Pricing is {your_desired_instance_type_cost} * 24h * 31 days (1month) PLUS:

• Data-transfer costs
• Volumes costs

ELB:

1. Don't care about maintaining.
2. Don't care about autoscaling.
3. Base Pricing is 0.0252$ * 24h * 31 days (1month) ~= 18,74$/month PLUS:

• Data-transfer costs
• LCU (Load Balancer Capacity Units) cost
• Additional costs for 10+ load balancer rules

For ELB calculations you can try this AWS ELB calculator

For EC2 + Nginx you can use AWS Pricing Calculator

From my experience - go for ELB. You set this up once and don't even care about anything else. It's easy to configure (IaC), it has 99.95% uptime (you won't get similar with ec2+nginx), and it's not so expensive. Additionally you can attach AWS WAF to ELB now, and you can easly point your CloudFront distribution to ELB.