Assigning Static IP Address to AWS Load Balancer

Question

How can I assign a static IP address to a ELB. Seems like I cannot.

Some articles online asks to create a Route 53 record but this requires changing CNAME of domain which also redirect email traffic. I just want to change A record not CNAME.

Some articles also mention that I can use a EC2 instance as a reverse proxy. But will a single proxy be able to handle a lot of traffic?

Any solution for this?

Answer 1

A new feature in AWS (I believe it was announced at Re:Invent 2017) allows for static IPs with Network Load Balancers (NLB). NLB can only handle layer 4 (TCP) and not HTTP specifics (layer 7).

You can assign one Elastic IP address per availability zone.

For details see the AWS blog post or the NLB documentation.

The "Classic Load Balancer" and "Application Load Balancer" do not support static IPs. If you need a feature only provided by those, you have to fall back to the CNAME solution described above.

Answer 2

You must add the CNAME record into your NDS zone to make it works:

yourhostname IN CNAME some-lb-XXXXX.elb.amazon.com.

do not forgot dot in the end of load-balancer name.

Answer 3

A blog was recently published by AWS support on this topic leveraging NLB to provide static IP to Classic and Application load balancer - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/using-static-ip-addresses-for-application-load-balancers/

Summary of solution as described by the post

We end up with a TCP listener on a NLB that accepts traffic and forwards it to an internal ALB. The ALB terminates TLS, examines HTTP headers, and routes requests based on your configured rules to target groups with your instances, servers, or containers. The AWS Lambda function keeps everything in sync by watching the ALB for IP address changes and updating the NLB target group. In the end we’ll have a few static IP addresses that are easy for whitelisting, and we won’t lose any of the benefits of ALB. Note that we will be sending all of the traffic through two load balancers

Answer 4

AWS' Elastic Load Balancer is actually elastic on two levels as described here: http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/07/elastic-in-elastic-load-balancing-elb.html

The first level is the load balancer itself. In order to make sure that ELB can scale to whatever volume you have and burst to whatever volume you suddenly encounter, AWS assigns a 'static' DNS hostname (e.g. MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com). That hostname points to multiple IP addresses. You can see that (from a command line) by running

$ host MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com
MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com 172.31.7.2
MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com 172.31.11.33

The second form of elasticity within the ELB is obviously then ELB directing the query to one of your EC2 instances in the pool.

So, you can see that trying to assign a static IP address to the load balancer would be self-defeating.

Using an EC2 instance as a reverse proxy would also seem self-defeating as you would then create a bottleneck before even getting to the ELB. Might as well just create your own load balancer.

The recommended solution (which you've pointed out) is to create a CNAME that points to the ELB hostname (which won't change).

i.e. my-app.mycompany.com -> MyDomainELB-918273645.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com

This would allow you to integrate your scalable application, behind the ELB within your domain.

I'm not sure I fully understand why you cannot create a CNAME in your DNS or what that has to do with directing email traffic, can you explain?