Reduce costs by optimizing your Elastic Load Balancers. Learn strategies to eliminate unnecessary load balancers, choose the right type for your workloads, and fine-tune configurations for maximum cost efficiency.
Elastic Load Balancers are essential for distributing traffic across multiple instances, but many organizations maintain load balancers that are underutilized, misconfigured, or simply no longer needed. These idle or poorly configured ELBs continue to incur charges, consuming a significant portion of your cloud budget without delivering proportional value.
Optimizing your ELB configuration directly impacts your cloud infrastructure efficiency and costs
Cut ELB-related expenses by 30-50% by eliminating unnecessary load balancers and selecting optimal configurations.
Gain insights into actual traffic patterns and load balancer utilization to make informed optimization decisions.
Right-sized load balancers deliver better performance for your applications with optimal health check configurations.
Reduce complexity by consolidating redundant load balancers and aligning configurations with workload requirements.
Choose the Right Tool for Your Workload
AWS offers three types of load balancers, each with different pricing and capabilities. Classic Load Balancers are the most expensive option, while Application Load Balancers excel at Layer 7 routing, and Network Load Balancers provide ultra-high performance at lower costs for specific use cases.
Eliminate Redundant Load Balancers
Review all active load balancers to identify those serving retired applications, redundant deployments, or single-instance backends that don't justify load balancer costs. Consolidate multiple smaller load balancers into fewer, optimized instances.
Fine-Tune Performance and Costs
Health check frequency, interval timing, and threshold settings directly impact both performance and costs. Overly aggressive health checks consume unnecessary resources, while properly tuned configurations ensure reliability without waste.
Leverage native AWS services to monitor, manage, and optimize your load balancers
Monitor load balancer metrics, request counts, latency, and health check status in real-time.
Analyze ELB-related costs and identify optimization opportunities with detailed cost breakdowns.
Programmatically manage and audit load balancer configurations across your AWS environment.
Get automated recommendations for load balancer optimization and security improvements.
Analyze traffic patterns to understand which load balancers are truly necessary for your workloads.
Automate load balancer configuration management and compliance checks at scale.
Create a comprehensive inventory of all load balancers. Document type, associated backend instances, traffic patterns, and deployment dates.
Review CloudWatch metrics for request counts, active connections, and latency. Identify load balancers with consistently low utilization.
Assess whether Classic Load Balancers can be migrated to cheaper Application or Network Load Balancers without sacrificing functionality.
Flag load balancers serving retired applications, duplicate deployments, or single-instance backends as candidates for decommissioning.
Review and tune health check intervals, thresholds, and timeouts to balance reliability with resource efficiency.
Migrate backends to consolidated load balancers using host or path-based routing rules where applicable.
Safely remove obsolete load balancers after verifying no dependent traffic or applications remain.
Set up CloudWatch alarms and establish quarterly reviews to ensure continued optimization as your infrastructure evolves.
Organizations typically achieve measurable savings within weeks of implementing ELB optimization strategies
from ELB optimization efforts
for initial optimizations
into load balancer utilization
of monitoring and management tasks
Let our cloud experts audit your load balancers and identify significant cost-saving opportunities. We'll create a customized optimization roadmap tailored to your infrastructure.