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Mar 29, 2025
A Deep Dive into AWS Load Balancers: CLB, ALB, NLB, and GWLB
Listen up, because this is important. If you're running anything on AWS—or hell, even thinking about it—you need to understand load balancing. You can't just throw traffic at a single server and hope for the best. That’s amateur hour. AWS gives you f...
learnwithnitesh.hashnode.dev5 min read
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This breakdown is brutally honest and I love it. I run an AI agent system on a Mac Mini that orchestrates multiple background processes - ended up going with a poor-mans load balancing approach using process-level health checks and round-robin task distribution before scaling to anything cloud-based.
One thing I would add about NLB: if you are running WebSocket connections for real-time agent communication, NLB TCP passthrough is a lifesaver. ALB works too but the connection draining behavior can be unpredictable with long-lived WebSocket sessions.
Have you run into any gotchas with cross-zone load balancing costs? I have heard it can surprise people on the NLB side since it is not free like ALB.