Cloud load balancers are backed by the legendary Fanatical Support® you can only get from Rackspace. Included with cloud load balancers, customers get:
To receive 24x7x365 support for Amazon EC2, you pay the greater of $400 per month or 10% (scaling down) of your ELB costs. That means your support cost goes up with your ELB usage and isn't directly related to the amount of support you use.
Do you want to use A-records to map domain names and web server IPs? A dedicated IP address allows for use as a root record for a zone. This gives customers more flexible and natural deployment options.
When you create an ELB instance, you get a public DNS name; however, it's not very user friendly and you will want to create a CNAME record in DNS to redirect to your URL. If you delete your ELB instance and create it again, you'll need to update your CNAME record since you got a new public DNS name. This isn't exactly simple or intuitive.
For centralised access control, the Rackspace cloud load balancer has an ACL-based security model, which allows users to define what hosts and networks have access to a load balanced service.
Access control list feature is not available.
To simplify log management, the connection logging feature allows for Apache-style access logs (for HTTP-based protocol traffic) or connection and transfer logging (for all other traffic) to be sent to your Cloud Files account. Logs are sorted, aggregated, and delivered hourly to Cloud Files™, which is perfect for users who need to perform tuning, inspection, or analysis.
Connection logging feature is not available. Customers must find an alternative method for aggregating log data from multiple backend nodes.
As an additional security feature, Rackspace cloud load balancers have a connection throttling feature which imposes limits on the number of connections per IP address to help mitigate malicious or abusive traffic to your application or website.
Connection throttling feature is not available.
Customise the behaviour of your cloud load balancer with selectable algorithms, including: random, round robin, weighted round robin, least connections, and weighted least connections.
ELB utilises only a non-configurable round robin load balancing algorithm.
Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers can use synthetic transaction monitoring to inspect an HTTP response code and body content to ensure the application or site is healthy. In the event that a node is not responding correctly, it will be removed from rotation until the health check determines the node is functioning as expected.
While HTTP and TCP-based health monitors are available, ELB does not permit users to define an acceptable status code or body regular expression to match against.
Shared IPs gives you the ability to share IP addresses with other load balancers on the same account. Shared IPs facilitates easier management and better IP utilisation of load balancer configuration.
ELB does not permit users to share a single IP address across multiple load balancers, but does allow for a single load balancer to support multiple port configurations.
Internal virtual IPs allow you to load balance traffic without traversing the public Internet. This feature allows you to load balance internal services, without being penalized with external bandwidth charges.
All ELBs are configured as public virtual IPs. An internal virtual IP option is not available.
Supports SSL termination at the load balancer.
Supports SSL termination at the load balancer.