Contents
What is Amazon ELB (ELB)? Overview of AWS Load Balancer Service
Introduction
Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is a highly scalable and reliable load balancing service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It helps distribute incoming network traffic across multiple targets such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, improving the availability of your applications. This blog post will provide an overview of ELB and its essential features.
Features of Amazon ELB
1. High Availability
One of the key features of Amazon ELB is its ability to automatically distribute incoming traffic across a fleet of EC2 instances, making applications highly available and fault-tolerant. ELB actively monitors the health of the registered instances and automatically redirects traffic away from any unhealthy instances.
2. Scalability
ELB seamlessly scales as the demand for your application increases or decreases. By automatically distributing traffic, ELB ensures that no single instance becomes overloaded. It allows you to scale your infrastructure horizontally without any disruption to ongoing traffic.
3. Load Balancing Algorithms
ELB uses three types of load balancing algorithms to distribute traffic evenly across instances:
– Round Robin: Requests are distributed in a cyclic manner to each registered instance.
– Least Outstanding Requests: Requests are sent to the instance with the fewest open connections.
– IP Hash: ELB calculates a hash of the source IP address to consistently direct requests from the same address to the same instance.
4. SSL/TLS Offloading
ELB supports SSL termination, allowing the load balancer to handle SSL/TLS encryption and decryption. This reduces the computational load on your application instances, improving their performance.
5. Application Layer Health Checks
ELB can perform health checks at the application layer to ensure that only healthy instances receive traffic. By monitoring specific URLs or listening for responses from the instances, it can detect and automatically remove any instances that are not functioning properly.
6. Integration with Auto Scaling
ELB integrates seamlessly with AWS Auto Scaling, allowing you to automatically add or remove instances based on your application’s traffic patterns. This ensures that your infrastructure scales up or down to meet demand while maintaining optimal performance.
Conclusion
Amazon ELB is a powerful load balancing service provided by AWS for distributing incoming traffic across multiple targets in a highly available and scalable manner. It simplifies the management of your infrastructure by automatically balancing the load and ensuring the uninterrupted availability of your applications. By leveraging ELB, you can improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of your applications on the AWS platform.
Reference Articles
Read also
[Google Chrome] The definitive solution for right-click translations that no longer come up.