49. Introduction to AWS Elastic Load Balancer

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a variety of services to meet an organization's infrastructure needs. One such service is Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), which is a load balancing service that automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It ensures that the workload is distributed efficiently and helps to increase the availability and fault tolerance of your applications.

What is AWS Elastic Load Balancer?

AWS Elastic Load Balancer is a load balancing service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple instances, IP addresses, containers, and Lambda functions. It can handle varying traffic load of your application within a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones. ELB offers three types of load balancers that have varying capabilities:

• Application Load Balancer: Best for load balancing HTTP and HTTPS traffic, and offers advanced request routing aimed at delivering multiple applications from a single balancer.
• Network Load Balancer: Best for load balancing TCP, UDP, and TLS traffic where extreme performance is required.
• Classic load balancer: This is the original AWS load balancer. However, many of the more advanced features are only available with application and network load balancers.

How does AWS Elastic Load Balancer work?

The ELB accepts incoming traffic and automatically distributes it among all healthy instances that have registered with it. It monitors the health of your registered instances and ensures that traffic is not directed to unhealthy instances until they are healthy again.

Load balancers can be configured to listen for requests on multiple ports and forward those requests to target ports on registered instances. They can also be configured to check the health of registered instances at regular intervals. If an instance fails the health checks, the ELB stops forwarding traffic to that instance until it has passed the health checks.

Benefits of AWS Elastic Load Balancer

AWS Elastic Load Balancer offers several benefits, including:

• High Availability: ELB automatically distributes traffic across multiple instances to avoid single points of failure. It also detects unhealthy instances and diverts traffic from them until they are healthy again.
• Scalability: The ELB is capable of automatically scaling its load balancing capacity in response to incoming traffic.
• Security: The ELB offers security features such as integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control who can access your ELB, and support for encrypting inbound and outbound traffic using o Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Conclusion

The AWS Elastic Load Balancer is a powerful tool that can help improve the availability and scalability of your applications. It offers high availability by distributing traffic across multiple instances and can automatically scale its load balancing capacity to handle traffic spikes. Plus, it offers robust security features to help protect your applications.

Understanding AWS Elastic Load Balancer is critical to effectively managing your AWS infrastructure. Whether you're a systems administrator, solution architect, or developer, having a solid understanding of the ELB can help you design and implement robust, scalable solutions on AWS.

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