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With Apigee Load Balancer why do i need ELB,ALB,NLB, Global Load Balancers

I understand Apigee can forward/loadbalance the request to target server. But various cloud provider sell their load balancer, if in my app which is backend i'm just exposing API's and i use apigee edge, why do i need any of those Load balancer? Am i missing anything conceptually?

Solution

  • This is probably too late a reply, but from an architecture / solution perspective that is a good question. If there are others with actual experience of Apigee LB usage some comments would be useful (e.g. was it reliable) I suspect that the answer is going to be very solution dependant...

    To answer your specific question - if you can remove existing LBs by using Apigee, that is good to reduce complexity and number of network hops. Key factors I would look at:

    • If you are using AWS, and your existing solutions rely on ELBs, you would not want to turn them off in favour of Apigee
    • Which team is responsible for the LBs now? is it the same team as Apigee? If so, shifting LBs to Apigee is much more feasible reducing one layer of traffic handling
    • If you are using cloud Apigee, routing to on-prem (private cloud) services - Apigee could be used for DR level LB and on-prem LBs continue as now.