Creating an Application Load Balancer in AWS

Summary

In this lab, you will provision an Applicaiton Load Balancer in AWS. You will configure the Load Balancer to balance web traffic between two web servers deployed on Amazon EC2 instances.

Each exercise below builds upon the previous one. You should start each new exercise from the last step of the previous exercise unless it is explicitly written otherwise.

Learning Objectives

After completion of this lab, you will be able to:

Prerequisites

To complete this lab, you will need the following:

Changes in the VM Creation

When following the instructions for the AWS EC2 Instance With Ubuntu and NGINX Web Server lab, implement the following changes:

• In Exercise #1: Provision an EC2 Instance with Ubuntu Linux, do the following changes:
  • In Step 7, select the default subnet in us-east-2a
  • In Step 9, use computelab01-ec2-i02 for the Name of the second EC2 instance
  • In Step 11, select the existing security group computelab01-ec2-sg if it already exists
• In Exercise #5: Modify the web server’s home page, do the following changes:
  • In Step 4, type the following
    Hello, <code>computelabadmin!</code>! I am virtual machine #01 for the first virtual machine, and
    Hello again, <code>computelabadmin!</code>! I am virtual machine #02 for the second virtual machine

Exercise #1: Provision an Application Load Balancer in AWS

In this exercise, you will provision an Application Load Balancer in AWS.

Steps

1. 1. Sign into the AWS Management Console at https://aws.amazon.com/console/ using your AWS credentials
   2. In the Find Services search box, type EC2, and press Enter
   3. Click on the Load Balancers link in the left-hand navigation
   4. Click on the button
   5. Click on the button under Application Load Balancer (HTTP/HTTPS)
   6. In Step 1: Configure Load Balancer, the Basic Configuration section, fill in the following information:
      Name → networkinglab01-ec2-lb
      Scheme → internet-facing
      IP address type → ipv4
   7. In Step 1: Configure Load Balancer, the Availability Zones section, select the following:
      us-east-2a
us-east-2b
us-east-2c
   8. In Step 1: Configure Load Balancer, expand the Tags section, and add the following tags:
      Name → networkinglab01-ec2-lb
      Role → web
      Lab → networkinglab01
      Owner → <your name>
      OwnerEmail → <your email>
   9. Click on the button
   10. Click on the button
   11. In Step 3: Configure Security Groups, select the following Security Group:
       computelab01-ec2-sg
   12. Click on the button
   13. In Step 4: Configure Routing, the Target group section, fill in the following:
       Target group → New target group
       Name → computelab01-web-instances
       Target type → Instance
       Protocol → HTTP
       Port → 80
   14. Click on the button
   15. In Step 5: Register Targets, the Instances section, select the following instances:
       computelab01-ec2-i01
computelab01-ec2-i02
   16. Click on the button
   17. Click on the button
   18. Review the input and click on the button
   19. Once the Application Load Balancer is deployed, click on the button
   20.  Milestone step:  At this point, you have learned how to provision an Application Load Balancer in AWS. Verify that you have an entry with the following information in your list of Application Load Balancers.
       Name → networkinglab01-ec2-lb

Exercise #2: Testing an Application Load Balancer in AWS

In this exercise, you will test the Application Load Balancer that you created in AWS. You can test the Application Load Balancer by accessing its DNS name from a browser.

Steps

1. Click on the networkinglab01-ec2-lb Application Load Balancer in the list
2. In the Description tab, note the DNS name
   
3. Open a new browser window, and paste the above DNS name in the Address Bar
4.  Milestone step:  The page shows the home page of the NGINX server on computelab01-vm01
5. Refresh the page in the browser
6.  Milestone step:  The page shows the home page of the NGINX server on computelab01-vm02
   
   Note: Depending on your browser’s caching settings, you may need to refresh the page more than once to see the second home page