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How It Works
ELB sits in front of your application and routes each incoming request to a healthy target in one or more Availability Zones. AWS offers four load balancer types: Application Load Balancer (ALB) for HTTP and HTTPS traffic, Network Load Balancer (NLB) for TCP and UDP traffic at ultra-low latency, Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) for deploying third-party virtual appliances, and Classic Load Balancer (CLB) for older EC2-Classic workloads. Each type charges a fixed hourly rate plus a consumption-based unit charge tied to the volume and complexity of the traffic it processes. AWS calls this unit the Load Balancer Capacity Unit (LCU), and each LCU covers a specific number of new connections, active connections, processed bytes, and rule evaluations per hour.
Why It Matters for Cloud Cost
ELB costs are easy to overlook because they accumulate quietly alongside compute and storage bills. Teams that provision load balancers for short-lived environments, staging workloads, or forgotten proof-of-concept projects often carry idle LCU charges for months. Costs also rise with cross-zone load balancing enabled, because AWS charges for data processed between Availability Zones. Without visibility into how many load balancers are running and what each one is handling, finance and engineering teams cannot distinguish necessary spend from waste. Understanding ELB pricing is especially important in microservices architectures, where each service may have its own ALB, and per-rule charges can compound quickly.
ClearCost provides cost visibility and showback reporting across AWS accounts, giving finance and engineering teams a clearer view of where cloud spend is going, including networking costs like ELB.