Amazon Web Services (AWS) has upgraded its management console, allowing IT staff to use it to administer security protocols on the Elastic Load Balancing service, the company said in a blog post.
IT personnel can now manage the listeners (which detect client connections), SSL certificates and SSL ciphers for an existing Elastic Load Balancer from within the AWS Management Console, according to Amazon. The functionality has been available via the API and command line tools, but many users wanted to be able to use the console to configure these settings, it said.
This upgrade makes it easier to get started and maintain load balancing in Amazon's cloud, according to the blog post.
Elastic Load Balancing allows users to distribute incoming traffic across multiple EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) virtual servers, or instances. The service scales its capacity in response to incoming application traffic and when it detects instances with performance problems it no longer sends traffic to them, according to Amazon.
Amazon has also expanded IPv6 support for Elastic Load Balancing to include its U.S. West (Northern California) and U.S. West (Oregon) regions.
That means IPv6 support for Elastic Load Balancing is available in all regions but South America (Sao Paolo).
The company first added support for using the protocol with its load balancing service last May, as part of the World IPv6 day tests. However, at that time usage was limited to all Elastic Load Balancers in the U.S. East (Northern Virginia) and E.U. (Ireland) regions, the company said at the time.
The wider support for IPv6 comes as the Internet Society and a number of equipment vendors, Web companies and operators are getting ready for the "World IPv6 Launch," which [[xref:http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/011712-ipv6-launch-254964.html|will take place on June 6. |Leading ISPs, websites commit to June 6 start for IPv6]]
Elastic Load Balancing users are charged for each hour or partial hour use and for each gigabyte of data transferred through the Elastic Load Balancer. For example, a medium-size website running on 10 Amazon EC2 instances in Northern Virginia could use one Elastic Load Balancer to balance incoming traffic.
If the load balancer ended up transferring 100GB of data over a 30-day period, the monthly charge would amount to US$18 (or $0.025 per hour x 24 hours per day x 30 days x 1 Elastic Load Balancer) for the load balancer and $0.80 (or $0.008 per GB x 100 GB) for the data transferred, according to Amazon.
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