Cut to the Chase by Pallav Bora

AWS Application Load Balancer VS Network Load Balancer Distribution of Traffic: Application Load Balancer: Based on attributes of OSI Layer 7 (Application Layer). Network Load Balancer: Based on attributes of OSI Layer 4 (Transport Layer). Application Health Application Load Balancer: Since it works at the Application Layer of the OSI the health of the target application can be verified and the application health is taken into distribution decision. Network Load Balancer: Since it works at the Transport Later of the OSI level the health of the application can not be verified (it uses IP address , port etc). So it is possible that a request gets sent to a server even the the target application on that server is having some issues. Speed: Since Network Load Balancers work at a lower layer of the OSI they are faster then Application Load Balancers. More than one different application on the same server Since Network Load Balancers use IP address to distribute requ