I built ZoneHero, managed load balancing that minimises costs in AWS

Hacker News

Hi HN, I've been working on ZoneHero for the past year after being frustrated with the high costs of running load balancers across multiple Availability Zones in AWS. If you've managed large-scale applications on AWS, you've likely noticed that cross-AZ data transfer can become unpleasantly expensive. ZoneHero is a managed control plane for load balancing that runs Envoy proxies (which run in your VPC, we maintain them) with a custom cross-AZ load balancing algorithm. The key difference from AWS ALB is that ZoneHero only crosses AZ boundaries when necessary, automatically directing traffic to instances in the same AZ when possible. This reduces cross-AZ data transfer to almost nothing, directly cutting your AWS bill. I built this because at my previous job managing large AWS infrastructure, our load balancing costs seemed incompressible: cross-AZ traffic was always going to cost us even more than the ELB itself. The product is very developer-centric: we provide a terraform provider and a CLI to interact with our API. There's no fancy UI, logs go to S3, and metrics to CloudWatch. You pay only for what you use (LCU-based + costs of running the proxy nodes). Being a SaaS product, I can't offer a sign-up free experience, but integration with the AWS Marketplace should make it as painless as possible to get started. I'd love feedback from the HN community, especially if you're running large-scale services on AWS and have been hit by surprising cross-AZ charges. PS: I hope you appreciate the absence of cookies, and therefore cookie-banner, on the website.

Visit product View on Hacker NewsMar 24, 2025

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