AWS Elastic Load Balancing
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a managed service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, within one or more Availability Zones. It enhances the availability and fault tolerance of applications by monitoring the health of registered targets and routing traffic only to healthy ones. ELB supports various load balancer types, including Application Load Balancer (ALB), Network Load Balancer (NLB), and Classic Load Balancer, each optimized for different use cases.
Developers should use AWS ELB when building scalable and highly available applications on AWS, such as web applications, microservices, or APIs, to handle varying traffic loads and ensure reliability. It is essential for distributing traffic across multiple servers to prevent overloading any single instance, improving performance and enabling seamless scaling during traffic spikes. ELB also integrates with other AWS services like Auto Scaling and AWS Certificate Manager for automated scaling and SSL/TLS termination.