ELB

Last updated: Nov 3, 2026

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Rationale

AWS ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) is the service that Fluid Attacks uses to expose applications to the Internet. It gives load balancers with an IaaS model.

These are the primary reasons why Fluid Attacks selected it and not other alternatives:

• It integrates easily with VPC, EC2, EKS, and other services. Thus, it is easy to serve applications that are in the cloud.
• It complies with many certifications from ISO and CSA. Many of these certifications make sure that the entity uses best practices for secure cloud-based environments and information security.
• Together with Kubernetes, it balances the application load, because it sends requests to more than one replica with a horizontal scaling approach.
• It has its own Kubernetes module that automatically provisions application load balancers when Fluid Attacks deploys Kubernetes applications.
• It supports VPC security groups. Thus, Fluid Attacks can easily set inbound and outbound networking rules for the load balancers.
• Application Load Balancers support mutual TLS authentication through an aws_lb_trust_store that has a CA bundle in S3. Fluid Attacks uses this function to apply Authenticated Origin Pulls on app.fluidattacks.com. On each connection, Cloudflare must give a leaf certificate that the private CA of Fluid Attacks signed. If it does not, the load balancer rejects the TLS handshake. This replaces fragile IP-allowlist patterns that protect against CDN bypass.
• One load balancer supports more than one availability zone. This gives networking redundancy, which is necessary to keep it always available on the Internet.
• It supports health checks. Thus, it continuously monitors all the endpoints of a load balancer. It sends application requests only to healthy endpoints.
• Application load balancers support rules. Thus, Fluid Attacks can make advanced routing configurations to forward requests.
• It supports application load balancers, network load balancers, and gateway load balancers. Thus, it gives infrastructure for many different solutions.
• Fluid Attacks can monitor load balancers with CloudWatch.

Alternatives

Usage

Fluid Attacks uses ELB for these tasks:

• To serve the production environment and the experimental environment of its platform

Fluid Attacks does not use ELB to serve its website, because Framer hosts it behind Cloudflare. Thus, it is not necessary to manage load balancers.