Which statement best describes Elastic Load Balancing?
A service that monitors applications and automatically adds or removes capacity from resource groups in response to changing demand.
A service that provides data for monitoring applications, optimize resource utilization, and respond to system-wide performance changes.
A service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances.
A service that provides the capability to create, manage, and scale a distributed in-memory or cache environment in the cloud.
The correct answer and explanation is :
The correct answer is:
“A service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances.”
Explanation:
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) solution designed to distribute incoming network or application traffic across multiple resources, such as EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses. Its primary purpose is to ensure that traffic is efficiently distributed to maintain application performance, high availability, and fault tolerance.
Key Features of Elastic Load Balancing:
- Traffic Distribution: ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets like Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or Lambda functions. This helps prevent any single instance from becoming overwhelmed by too much traffic, which could result in poor performance or service outages.
- High Availability: ELB helps ensure that applications remain available even if individual resources fail. When an EC2 instance or target becomes unhealthy, the load balancer automatically routes traffic away from that instance to healthy ones, ensuring continuous service.
- Scalability: ELB integrates with Auto Scaling, which allows the automatic addition or removal of EC2 instances based on traffic load. As traffic demand increases, ELB can distribute the load to newly added instances. When traffic decreases, it can redirect traffic away from underused instances, which optimizes costs.
- Security: Elastic Load Balancing can work with AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect applications from common web exploits, and it supports Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) termination to offload the SSL encryption and decryption process.
- Types of Load Balancers:
- Application Load Balancer (ALB): Best for HTTP/HTTPS traffic and provides advanced routing capabilities.
- Network Load Balancer (NLB): Designed for high-performance scenarios and operates at the transport layer (Layer 4).
- Classic Load Balancer (CLB): Older generation load balancer suitable for basic use cases.
Elastic Load Balancing ensures that web applications can scale efficiently, handle more traffic, and maintain high availability without manual intervention.