Load balancing done right, finally!

ELB Connection Draining - Remove Instances From Service With Care

So it is now (finally) possible to ensure that all in-flight requests are completed before an instance gets de-registered from an ELB (graceful removal). Until now, anytime an instance was removed from ELB, the plug was pulled causing:

• Half-drawn web pages
• Aborted file downloads
• Failed web service calls

…each of which resulted in an unhappy user or customer.

Feature or bug-fix?

And no, it isn’t innovation. Connection draining has been possible even with the open source software load balancer HAProxy since many years!

Witness the power of marketing!

Just one final question:
After all this, why isn’t Connection Draining enabled by default on AWS?