Enhancing your ELB health-checks
The stock ELB health checks allow you to check raw TCP responses or go higher in the stack and look for an HTTP/200 response.
Either is good. A basic check should get you started but as your application and its dependencies evolve, you might need to enrich your health checks too.
Let us suppose that you were serving a web application that relies on a cache and a database backend.
If the ELB was checking TCP:80 then as long as your HTTP daemon is running, it will receive an OK. If you were checking for an HTTP/200, instead that would verify access to the application's file(s) on disk but likely not much more.
Instead, you could benefit much more from pointing the ELB at a dedicated health check endpoint within your ...
Get Implementing DevOps on AWS now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
