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Walid BATTOU
Walid BATTOU

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Application Load Balancer Pricing - FinOps

I would like to thank the people who gave me some feeback on my first article.

On this one, I made an animation about the pricing of an Application Load Balancer on AWS and my FinOps recommendations for it.

If you still have some Classic Load Balancer in place, you pay for DataProcessing and not LCU. Migrate CLB to ALB to save cost.

The CLB (Classic Load Balancer) was released in 2009, ALB (Application Load Balancer) was released in 2016. If you started on AWS before 2016, you had no choice but taking CLB.

Check your workloads and do the migration.

If you don’t use API Gateway features, challenge the migration to an ALB to reduce cost.

This recommendation applies to a Serverless use case. When you start using Lambda for building an API, the default choice is API Gateway.

Since 2018, it has been possible to use an ALB to invoke lambda functions and serve HTTP(S) requests, which can be cheaper.

When enabling access log, do not forget to define s3 retention policy.

When using an ALB, think about defining your observability strategy :

  • How do I check my logs ?
  • Which dashboard will I use ?
  • I store it on s3 but which period do I need to archive ?

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