Elastic Load Balancing in EC2

Question

It's been on the cards for a while, but now that Amazon has released Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), what are your thoughts on deploying this solution for a high-traffic web application?

Should we replace HAProxy or consider ELB as a complimentary service in front of HAProxy?

Answer 1

I've been running ELB instead of HAProxy and it is producing amazing results.

This issue has been fixed by Amazon AWS, see comments below:

• You can't load balance the root of a website as you have got to create a CNAME alias to your load balancer. Once the solution is to redirect all traffic from http://mydomain.com to http://www.mydomain.com.

Apart from that I really can't speak highly enough of the AWS ELB offerings. I'm also using the Cloudwatch monitoring and autoscaling. Oh and don't forget it's cheaper than running a small EC2 instance ($0.025 per hour instead of $0.10).