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Getting Started with Compute: Key Concepts to Understand Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) in AWS

By: Author Alex Lim

Posted on

Categories Cloud Computing

Learn the definition of Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) in AWS and how this service distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets like EC2 instances.

Table of Contents

Question

Which definition best describes Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)?

A. A service that monitors applications and automatically adds or removes capacity from resource groups in response to changing demand
B. A service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances
C. A service that can be used to set up, manage, and scale a distributed in-memory or cache environment in the cloud
D. A service that provides data that can be used to monitor applications, optimize resource utilization, and respond to system-wide performance changes

Answer

B. A service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances

Explanation

ELB helps manage and distribute traffic to instances. An ELB balancer cannot add or remove instances. For this functionality, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can be used.

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is an AWS service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones.

ELB offers three types of load balancers:

  1. Application Load Balancer (ALB): Operates at the application layer (HTTP/HTTPS) and provides advanced routing, TLS termination, and visibility features.
  2. 2Network Load Balancer (NLB): Operates at the transport layer (TCP/UDP/TLS) and is capable of handling millions of requests per second while maintaining ultra-low latencies.
  3. Classic Load Balancer: Provides basic load balancing across multiple EC2 instances and operates at both the request level and connection level.

By efficiently distributing traffic to available targets, ELB improves application fault tolerance, enhances responsiveness, and helps ensure high availability and scalability.

The other options mentioned are:
A. AWS Auto Scaling
C. Amazon ElastiCache
D. Amazon CloudWatch

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