High Level AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) Overview

  • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) = evenly distributes traffic between EC2 instances that are associated with it.
  • ELB = foundational component of high availability and fault tolerance
  • Auto Scaling = automatically scaling up or down (more or less instances) based on traffic demand.
  • ELB can distribute traffic across multiple AZs and instances to increase fault tolerance.
  • ELB can auto detect unhealthy instances and redirect traffic and spin up a new instance to replace the unhealthy one.
  • 3 types of ELBs:
  1. A Network Load Balancer is a type of load balancer for increasing network performance, and managing TLS and TCP traffic.
  2. The Classic Load Balancer was the previous generation load balancer that managed HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP traffic. It is now used primarily for anyone utilizing the EC2-Classic network.
  3. An Application Load Balancer is a type of load balancer used for balancing traffic over HTTP and HTTPS.