Multiple Regions behind Load Balancer - how is traffic distributed?

I dont think You can do Multi Region Routing with ELB. You would need Route 53 for that.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/latency-based-multi-region-routing-now-available-for-aws/

Hi Tomas

I'm not sure if you've already got an answer for this, but it sounds very much like you need to use Route 53 and Geolocation based routing with health checks. Take a look at this:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-policy.html#routing-policy-geo

Basically Route53 will resolve requests for your server's DNS name to the to the closest server to the user that you've configured, and if you additionally configured health checks on the endpoints, Route 53 should then fail over in the case of a failure in a region goes down:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/health-checks-types.html

Bottom line is, you're best to use Route 53, the tight integration with the other AWS services will deliver a lot of value that you can set up in minutes. Should you wish to add multi-AZ support for high availability within a single region, or even both of your regions for example, this is very straightforward to set up with Route 53's Alias records.

Hope that's of some use!
Richard

Edited by: RJW on Apr 6, 2018 10:23 PM

I'll need to take a look at that. I'm inexperienced with this but from what I'm seeing my single host is currently behind a load balancer. I ALSO route requests from my domain name using Route 53. Sounds like I'm doing something redundant here? Or I could be reading my bill wrong. The "Elastic Compute Cloud" portion of my bill shows a "Elastic Load Balancing - Classic" line item. There's also "Route 53" (a simple $0.51/month charge).

Edit:

I read a little documentation and I think I figured out what happened here. Let me know if I have this right:

I found https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/latency-based-multi-region-routing-now-available-for-aws/ which describes having multiple regions behind Route 53. Originally when I used EBS, it created a load balancer for my host. There is only one host, but the load balancer is configured to spin up to 4 if the hosts go above a certain CPU%. It sounds like what I want is Route 53 pointing at two hosts (one US-WEST, one EU-WEST), and no load balancer at all. I don't really care about spinning up more hosts if those two get overloaded because this is for a non-critical hobby website.

Have I got that right? I think that solves my "route traffic to lowest latency host" problem, and it saves me some cash!

Edited by: ChakronSA on Feb 2, 2017 5:20 PM

Yes , For a Non Critical Website thats a Good Enough Solution.

Hello,

I have got to this conversation via Google Search an I would like to ask.

If I have 2x EC2 servers, one in the US and second in the EU and I need load balancing between them because availability reasons if one region goes down.

Do I need to use Route 53 for my domain and do it via "DNS"?

Or can I have my domain with other DNS provider like GoDaddy and do it using other Amazon services than DNS hosing??

regards
Tomas Zeman