Integrations of load balancers and other AWS services (for example, Global Accelerator, CloudFront, AWS WAF, Route 53, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [Amazon EKS], AWS Certificate Manager [ACM])

Can you describe the difference between AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront, and when you might choose one over the other?

AWS Global Accelerator provides consistent performance improvements for global users by routing traffic through the AWS global network infrastructure, whereas CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches content at edge locations to minimize latency. One would choose Global Accelerator when the goal is to optimize for performance by reducing internet latency and jitter, while CloudFront would be chosen to cache content close to users for faster delivery.

How does integrating AWS WAF with an Application Load Balancer benefit your application’s security?

AWS WAF, when integrated with an Application Load Balancer, provides automated web traffic filtering against common web exploits and helps protect against bot attacks. It ensures that only legitimate requests reach your application, which enhances security and potentially reduces the load on the server infrastructure.

When might you use Route 53’s health checks in combination with an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)?

Route 53 health checks can be used in combination with an ELB to implement DNS failover. If an ELB becomes unhealthy, Route 53 can detect this and route traffic to an alternate location, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.

How do you secure data in transit to an ELB using AWS Certificate Manager?

With AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), you can provision, manage, and deploy SSL/TLS certificates on ELBs to secure data in transit. ACM simplifies the process of handling the SSL/TLS operations, and it does so without additional cost, apart from the cost of running the ELB and the certificates themselves, which are provided free of charge by Amazon.

Can you explain how integrating Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) with an AWS Load Balancer improves service availability?

Integrating EKS with an AWS Load Balancer allows for the automatic distribution of incoming application traffic across multiple Kubernetes pods, which are typically spread across different nodes in a cluster. This improves service availability since the Load Balancer handles high availability and fault tolerance by rerouting traffic in case of pod or node failures.

What role does AWS Global Accelerator play in improving the performance of a multi-regional AWS application?

AWS Global Accelerator improves multi-regional application performance by directing user traffic to the nearest AWS edge location and then to the most optimal regional endpoint using the AWS global network. This reduces internet latency and jitter, leading to faster and more consistent application performance across regions.

How do you automate the failover process between primary and backup load balancers using Route 53?

You can automate the failover process by setting up health checks on both the primary and backup load balancers in Route If the primary fails, Route 53 will automatically route traffic to the backup based on the health check results, thus providing a seamless failover mechanism.

How does Amazon CloudFront integrate with AWS Shield for DDoS protection?

Amazon CloudFront integrates with AWS Shield, which provides DDoS protection for applications. AWS Shield Standard provides basic DDoS protection for all CloudFront distributions at no extra cost, while AWS Shield Advanced provides additional protection against more sophisticated and larger-scale attacks with detailed attack diagnostics.

Describe how you would use AWS WAF rate-based rules to mitigate potential DDoS attacks.

AWS WAF rate-based rules can be used to track the rate of requests for each originating IP address and to trigger an action if the request rate exceeds a limit set by the user. If a client IP is making requests at a higher rate than the threshold, the associated rule can block the traffic potentially preventing a DDoS attack.

How can you automatically manage the renewal and deployment of SSL/TLS certificates for an ELB with AWS Certificate Manager?

AWS Certificate Manager automates the process of renewing and deploying SSL/TLS certificates. Once you request and deploy an ACM certificate to an ELB, ACM handles the renewal process before the certificate expiration date, thereby reducing the manual effort required for certificate management. The updated certificate is then automatically deployed to the ELB with no service interruption.

What benefits does an Elastic Load Balancer offer when using it with Amazon EKS?

Using an ELB with EKS provides the benefit of high availability by automatically distributing incoming traffic across multiple EKS worker nodes. It also offers seamless integration with EKS services, ease of deploying containerized applications, scalability based on traffic, and health checks to ensure that traffic is only sent to healthy nodes.

Explain how Amazon CloudFront can reduce load on your origin servers while improving user experience.

Amazon CloudFront caches content at edge locations nearest to the users, reducing the need for users’ requests to reach the origin server every time. This reduces the load on the origin servers, as they are hit less frequently, while improving user experience by significantly reducing latency and accelerating content delivery to users.