Classic Load Balancer
Does ZopNight manage Classic Load Balancer?
Classic Load Balancers bill an hourly fee plus a per-GB charge on data processed, at worse unit economics than the ALB and NLB generations that replaced them. ZopNight does not yet inventory Classic Load Balancers: its load balancer discovery reads the ELBv2 API, which returns only Application, Network and Gateway Load Balancers.
Rules that fire on Classic Load Balancer
No active rule family targets Classic Load Balancer today. Rules that used to are retired, and retired rules publish no pages and fire no findings. Scheduling and permissions coverage are unaffected.
At a glance
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Scheduling notes | not yet discovered; no load balancer generation has a stop verb. |
The Classic Load Balancer is AWS’s legacy layer 4/7 load balancer, billed per hour plus data processed. Classic Load Balancers cost more per unit of work than ALB or NLB and signal aging infrastructure worth migrating.
Two meters, both legacy-priced
A CLB charges for every hour it exists and again for every GB it processes. Neither meter cares whether requests arrive. The newer generations meter capacity differently: ALB and NLB charge in LCU and NLCU units that scale with actual connections, new-connection rate, and bandwidth, which usually works out cheaper for the same workload. A CLB therefore carries two costs at once: the hourly fee it bills while idle, and the premium it bills over what an equivalent ALB or NLB would charge while busy.
How ZopNight treats a Classic Load Balancer
Classic Load Balancers do not yet appear in ZopNight’s inventory. Load balancer discovery uses the ELBv2 API, which returns Application, Network and Gateway Load Balancers but never classic ones, so a CLB has no resource row, no per-resource cost and no recommendations. Until that changes, find them with the console or CLI steps below; a healthy CLB is still a candidate for replacement with an ALB or NLB on better pricing. There is no stop verb for any load balancer generation, so nothing here is schedulable; the levers are delete and migrate.
The forgotten front door problem
CLBs almost never appear in new architectures, which is exactly why they leak money. The common patterns: a balancer fronting an application that was decommissioned, left behind because nobody was sure what still resolved to it; an old blue side of a blue-green setup that never got torn down; and long-lived staging stacks created years ago from templates that predate ALB. Each one bills its hourly fee around the clock.
Locating Classic Load Balancers today
In the EC2 console, open Load Balancers and filter the type column for classic entries; the AWS CLI equivalent is the standalone elb API rather than elbv2. Zero healthy targets or an empty request metric over a few weeks makes the delete-versus-migrate decision straightforward.