Why it's not a good idea to use a load balancer

Just wanted to share something in regards to setting up a load balancer on AWS.

In theory, it was a good idea. Place in a load balancer between the DNS CName and the EC2 Instance in order to accommodate shutdown and startups of instances in AWS as IP addresses change. Switching and directing traffic between relays by using the load balancer is a great idea as well.

This is all good until the hosting bill comes in. If you’re budgeting simply for a t2.large then you will be stung with also the extra ELB fees and data transfer fees.

Please correct me if I’m wrong and if there was a more cost-effective way to have that setup. Otherwise, please all avoid the load balancer :smiley:

Why do you need a LB? You have either way your relays that at best will have a public static ip and the BP you will have in private VPC.

You don’t need it.

The IP of an EC2 instance will change on a hard shutdown and start.

Unless you assign an elastic IP.

If I had to upgrade instance types or increase storage I would have to shut down the instance, apply the desired changes and restart resulting in an IP change. Having it behind a load balancer ensures that a DNS Cname always points to the instance and not a static IP avoiding needing to change the value of the Cname each hard restart.

Maybe I didn’t get your question, but I see that we agree :smiley:

Why you don’t use elastic IP?
As far as I know ELB is more expensive than EIP.

And mostly don’t restart relay.
cardano needs a high availability.

:joy: well it wasn’t a question. It was just a story about my experience and my AWS bill

I’m using our companies AWS account so I don’t have to pay for it out of my pocket and we’re out of elastic IPs. I couldn’t reallocate any unfortunately.

Ideally I should have started a new account as I wouldn’t have the EIP limit issue but then I’d have to find it differently.

Dang, that is an expensive bill. I mean if you’re running the minimum/recommended 2vCPU + 8GB RAM, its quite expensive already.

Definitely relatable for me as well. I have a similar issue as I have my BP sitting on a private subnet on AWS and I want to add my local Pi Relay Node. I can’t really find a cheap way of connecting my local Pi Node since I would have to spend more money using Direct Connect or Site-to-Site VPN :confused: