tencent cloud

Application Load Balancer

Product Comparison

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Last updated: 2026-09-28 16:39:08
AI-Translated & Reviewed
Tencent Cloud provides the following 3 products for load balancing: Application Load Balancer (ALB), Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB), and classic Cloud Load Balancer (CLB). These products are designed for different business scenarios with respective focuses in terms of the working layer, protocol support, forwarding capability, performance metrics, and so on. You can select an appropriate product based on your actual business requirements.

Product Positioning

Comparison Item
ALB
GWLB
CLB
Working layer
Layer 7 (application layer)
Layer 3 (network layer)
Layer 4 (transport layer) and layer 7 (application layer)
Core capability
Advanced HTTP/HTTPS routing and traffic management
Transparent traffic forwarding to third-party virtual devices
Basic layer‑4 and layer‑7 traffic distribution
Applicable stage
Primary product, commercial use
Commercial use
Commercial use

Feature Comparison

Comparison Item
ALB
GWLB
CLB
Network type
Public network and private network
No distinction
Public network and private network
Instance specification
No distinction (For capacity details, see Capacity Specifications.)
No distinction
Specification selection required
Listening protocol
HTTP and HTTPS
IP
TCP, UDP, TCP SSL, QUIC, HTTP, and HTTPS
Forwarding condition
Domain name, path, HTTP Header, Query String, HTTP request method, Cookie, and source IP address
None
Domain name and URL path
Forwarding action
Forwarding, redirection, returning a fixed response, rewriting, writing to a header, and deleting a header
None
Forwarding
Real server type
Target group with Cloud Virtual Machine (CVM) and Elastic Network Interface (ENI) resources
Target group
Standard real server
Load balancing algorithm
Weighted round robin (WRR) and weighted least connections (WLC)
5-tuple consistent hashing, 3-tuple consistent hashing, and 2-tuple consistent hashing
WRR, WLC, and source address hashing
Session persistence
Supported (Cookie insertion)
Not supported
Supported
Health check
TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS
Supported
TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS
Cross-AZ deployment
Supported
Supported
Supported
Auto scaling
Supported (auto scaling)
Not supported
Proactive specification management required
SSL/TLS offloading
Supported (TLS 1.3)
Not supported
Supported

Performance Comparison

Comparison Item
ALB
GWLB
CLB
Queries per second (QPS)
500,000 per virtual IP address (VIP) The overall performance can be scaled out as the number of VIPs increases.
Not involved
Up to 300,000 at the maximum specification
Connections per second (CPS)
200,000 per second per VIP The overall performance can be scaled out as the number of VIPs increases.
Not involved
Varying based on the instance specification
Maximum number of concurrent connections
5,000,000 The overall performance can be scaled out as the number of VIPs increases.
Not involved
Varying based on the instance specification
Inbound/outbound bandwidth
25 Gbps per VIP The overall performance can be scaled out as the number of VIPs increases.
50Gbps
Up to 60 Gbps at the maximum specification

Typical Scenarios

Scenario
Recommended Product
Description
Layer-7 traffic management for microservices/containerized applications
ALB
Content-based advanced routing gRPC, WebSocket, and TKE Ingress are supported.
Fine-grained routing for HTTP/HTTPS websites
ALB
Flexible forwarding based on the domain name, path, header, and other dimensions Redirection and rewriting are supported.
Release of services highly sensitive to risks and possible unpredictable impacts due to full rollout of new versions
ALB
Precise control over the traffic ratio between new and original versions based on the allocated target group weight or Header/Cookie-based forwarding rule Canary release is implemented.
Transparent deployment of third-party network virtual devices (firewalls/IDS/IPS)
GWLB
GENEVE encapsulation with the source IP address preserved for transparent traffic forwarding
Large-scale layer-4 traffic distribution
CLB
High-performance forwarding for TCP/UDP
Mixed layer‑4 and layer‑7 access scenarios for traditional websites
CLB
Support of layer-4 and basic layer-7 capabilities

References

For an overview of ALB, see Overview.
For an overview of GWLB, see Overview.
For an overview of classic CLB, see Overview.






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