Introduction to the Elastic Load Balancer
An Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is an AWS service that automatically distributes incoming network or application traffic to a number of EC2 instances. It monitors the health of each of the EC2 instances associated with it and forwards traffic only to healthy instances. An ELB provides a single point of contact for the EC2 instances behind the ELB. Each of the EC2 instances is marked with a status, either InService if it is healthy, or OutOfService if it is unhealthy. Traffic is routed only to InService instances. An ELB provides a single point of contact for the application traffic that is hosted on multiple EC2 instances. By routing traffic only to healthy instances, an ELB provides fault tolerance to the application and ensures high availability of the application:
Benefits of using an ELB
An ELB provides high availability, fault tolerance, elasticity, and security to your environment. We will now look at the benefits of an ELB in brief:
- High availability...
