A company is building a new workload on AWS that uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The company has configured a new ALB target group that uses slow start mode. A team begins registering…

The routing algorithm (e.g., round robin) is a separate configuration from slow start mode and does not prevent slow start from activating if its prerequisites are met.

Slow start mode only begins for targets when they transition from an unhealthy to a healthy state, or upon initial registration if the target group already contains at least one healthy target. If the target group did not contain any healthy targets at the time of testing, the slow start process would not initiate because the ALB would not begin sending traffic to the targets.

ALB target groups can contain EC2 instances of different instance types; this is not a prerequisite for slow start mode.

The 5-tuple criteria are used by Network Load Balancers (NLB) for connection hashing, not Application Load Balancers (ALB).