In my previous post "AWS Elastic Load Balancing session stickiness" I demonstrated the use of AWS ELB Load Balancer Generated Cookie Stickiness. In this post we'll use application generated cookie to control session stickiness.
To demonstrate this feature, I created a simple ASP.NET MVC application that just displays some instance details to test the load balancing.
Starting from the default ASP.NET MVC web application template, I modified the Index action of the HomeController:
Similar to what I've done in the previous posts using Linux shell scripts, this time I'm using C# code to request instance metadata from the http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/ URL then I store the host name and IP address in the ViewBag object and display them in the view:
I deployed the application to two EC2 Windows 2012 R2 instances. As expected, using the default ELB settings, requests will be routed randomly to one of the instances. This can be tested by looking at the host name and IP displayed in the response.
Looking to the request and response cookies, we can find the asp.net session cookie added:
To configure stickiness based on the ASP.NET_SessionId cookie, edit the stickiness configuration and enter the cookie name:
Checking the cookies, we find that ELB generates a cookie named "AWSELB". As documented: "The load balancer only inserts a new stickiness cookie if the application response includes a new application cookie."
Now the browser will send back both the session and ELB cookies:
Still my preference for maintaining session state is to use a distributed cache service like Redis or even SQL server. Because in case an instance goes down or is removed from an auto-scaling the user will lose his session data in case it's stored in memory.
To demonstrate this feature, I created a simple ASP.NET MVC application that just displays some instance details to test the load balancing.
Starting from the default ASP.NET MVC web application template, I modified the Index action of the HomeController:
Similar to what I've done in the previous posts using Linux shell scripts, this time I'm using C# code to request instance metadata from the http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/ URL then I store the host name and IP address in the ViewBag object and display them in the view:
I deployed the application to two EC2 Windows 2012 R2 instances. As expected, using the default ELB settings, requests will be routed randomly to one of the instances. This can be tested by looking at the host name and IP displayed in the response.
Looking to the request and response cookies, we can find the asp.net session cookie added:
To configure stickiness based on the ASP.NET_SessionId cookie, edit the stickiness configuration and enter the cookie name:
Checking the cookies, we find that ELB generates a cookie named "AWSELB". As documented: "The load balancer only inserts a new stickiness cookie if the application response includes a new application cookie."
Now the browser will send back both the session and ELB cookies:
Still my preference for maintaining session state is to use a distributed cache service like Redis or even SQL server. Because in case an instance goes down or is removed from an auto-scaling the user will lose his session data in case it's stored in memory.
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