Automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in one or more Availability Zones.
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Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a fully managed AWS service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. ELB helps improve the availability and fault tolerance of applications.
AWS offers three types of load balancers:
1. Application Load Balancer (ALB): Operates at layer 7 (application layer) of the OSI model. It's ideal for HTTP/HTTPS traffic and supports advanced routing, including path-based routing, host-based routing, and supports WebSockets and HTTP/2. ALB can route requests to targets across multiple Availability Zones.
2. Network Load Balancer (NLB): Operates at layer 4 (transport layer). It can handle millions of requests per second while maintaining ultra-low latencies. NLB is ideal for TCP, UDP, and TLS traffic where extreme performance is required.
3. Classic Load Balancer (CLB): The original ELB service that provides basic load balancing across EC2 instances. It operates at both the application and transport layers.
Key features of ELB include:
- Health checks to detect unhealthy instances
- Integration with AWS services like Auto Scaling
- Security features including integration with AWS Certificate Manager for SSL/TLS
- Support for hybrid environments
- CloudWatch integration for monitoring
- Sticky sessions capability
ELB helps architect highly available systems by distributing traffic across multiple AZs. If an entire AZ fails, ELB continues routing traffic to instances in other AZs.
For scalability, ELB automatically scales based on traffic patterns. It can be used with Auto Scaling to adjust capacity when demand changes.
ELB is a regional service, so each load balancer operates within a specific region, though it can distribute traffic to multiple AZs within that region.Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a fully managed AWS service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. ELB helps improve the availability and fault tolerance of applications.
AWS offers three type…