AWS Network Load Balancer
AWS Network Load Balancer (NLB) is a managed load balancing service from Amazon Web Services that operates at the transport layer (Layer 4) of the OSI model. It is designed to handle millions of requests per second with ultra-low latency, making it ideal for TCP, UDP, and TLS traffic. NLB automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, within a single or multiple Availability Zones.
Developers should use AWS Network Load Balancer when building high-performance, low-latency applications that require handling of TCP/UDP traffic, such as gaming servers, IoT applications, or real-time streaming services. It is particularly useful for scenarios needing static IP addresses, preserving source IP addresses for backend processing, or integrating with other AWS services like AWS Global Accelerator for improved global performance.