ALB Custom Stickiness options

Question

I'm trying to figure out if Application Load Balancer has a way to support repeatably routing to specific targets within an autoscaling target group based on e.g. a header value or origin IP.

Our environment generally involves many devices per customer, and our application would be more efficient if we could route all/most devices from one customer to a single target within the autoscaling group.  I've been looking at ALB's stickiness options, but there doesn't seem to be anything that immediately fits this pattern - individual devices can only be made sticky against targets after their initial connection.

Is there a way to achieve this using ALB, or should I be looking for a more configurable product for this?
I appreciate that NLB can do ip-based stickiness, but we use quite a lot of application-level features in our routing.

Answer

You are correct, Unlike NLB, ALB does not currently support Source IP based stickiness, currently only supported option is cookie based stickiness, below section from the [documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/sticky-sessions.html).

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By default, an Application Load Balancer routes each request independently to a registered target based on the chosen load-balancing algorithm. However, you can use the sticky session feature (also known as session affinity) to enable the load balancer to bind a user's session to a specific target. This ensures that all requests from the user during the session are sent to the same target. This feature is useful for servers that maintain state information in order to provide a continuous experience to clients. **To use sticky sessions, the client must support cookies**. Application Load Balancers support both duration-based cookies and application-based cookies

ALB Custom Stickiness options

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