Configuring the new ALB Host based routing with terraform

Yesterday, Amazon announced a new feature for the application load balancer that has been a long time coming.

Elastic Load Balancing Adds Support for Host-based Routing and Increased Rules on its Application…_We are pleased to announce support for Host-based routing on the Application Load Balancer. Host-based routing allows…_aws.amazon.com

At Globality, we are using ALB to route traffic to our ECS cluster. We are using target groups to target our many micro-services.

This feature removed a lot of complexity in our routing system and I thought it’s worth a quick post on configuring this with terraform

The code

resource "aws_alb" "alb" {name = "${var.name}-alb-${var.environment}"internal = truesecurity_groups = ["${var.security_group_id}"]subnets = ["${split(",", var.subnet_ids)}"]

tags {Environment = "${var.environment}"}}

resource "aws_alb_target_group" "alb_targets" {count = "${length(keys(var.services_map))}"name = "${element(values(var.services_map), count.index)}-${var.environment}"port = "${element(keys(var.services_map), count.index)}"protocol = "HTTP"vpc_id = "${var.vpc_id}"

health_check {healthy_threshold = 2interval = 15path = "/api/health"timeout = 10unhealthy_threshold = 2}

tags {Color = "${var.color}"Service = "${element(values(var.services_map), count.index)}"Tier = "${var.name}"Environment = "${var.environment}"}}

resource "aws_alb_listener" "alb_listener" {count = "1"load_balancer_arn = "${aws_alb.alb.arn}"port = "${element(keys(var.services_map), count.index)}"protocol = "HTTPS"ssl_policy = "ELBSecurityPolicy-2015-05"certificate_arn = "${var.ssl_certificate_arn}"

default_action {target_group_arn = "${element(aws_alb_target_group.alb_targets.*.arn, 0)}"type = "forward"}}

resource "aws_alb_listener_rule" "route_path" {count = "${length(values(var.services_map))}"listener_arn = "${aws_alb_listener.alb_listener.arn}"priority = "${1 + count.index}"

action {type = "forward"target_group_arn = "${element(aws_alb_target_group.alb_targets.*.arn, count.index)}"}

condition {field = "host-header"values = ["${element(values(var.services_map), count.index)}.${var.domain}"]}

lifecycle {ignore_changes = ["priority"]}}

As you can see, we are creating a single load balancer that has a single listener. This listener is the “default action” and can have many routing rules.

In the past, those rules consisted of path only, the new feature is adding host-header.

So, take our example. The default action is a single micro-service out of all our micro-services. Then, we add rules for the HTTP Host of all the other services and route the traffic to their target groups.

More than just a short code post

Really more than anything, this is a culture post. If you know you have pains in your system you need to always be looking for a solution and how you can make it better.

This feature came out yesterday and today we are already using it and converged out entire dev cluster.

This removed about 200 lines of code from our terraform repository and probably about the same amount from the scripts we use to manage and flip environments on deployment.

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