3.1 Ensure each Auto-Scaling Group has an associated Elastic Load Balancer

Information

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances within a VPC.

It enables greater levels of fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the required amount of load balancing capacity needed to distribute application traffic across 1 or more Availability Zones within a VPC.

Elastic Load Balancing must be integrated with Auto Scaling Groups to ensure that you have availability of compute resources in the event of a failure.
Integrating Auto Scaling Groups with an Elastic Load Balancer will help provide high availability and back-end EC2 instance scaling.

Through Auto-Scaling Group configuration you can define:

* minimum / maximum number of EC2 instances to be launched by the Auto-Scaling Group
* Availability Zones / subnets used

Solution

Using the Amazon unified command line interface:

* List existing load balancers:

aws elb describe-load-balancers --query 'LoadBalancerDescriptions[*].{ELBName:LoadBalancerName}'

or

* Create new load balancer:

aws elb create-load-balancer --load-balancer-name _<elb_name>_ --listeners _<listener_config>_ --subnets <application_subnet> --security-groups _<application_security_groups>_

* Attached load balancer from previous steps to autoscaling group:

aws autoscaling attach-load-balancers --load-balancer-names <elb_name> --auto-scaling-group-name <autoscaling_group_name>

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/files/260

Item Details

Category: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

References: 800-53|CM-8

Plugin: amazon_aws

Control ID: 7ffa7628869bcceaeba768d600bc16ca6d5f28a9431255f6762e486dc43b6c0d