Elastic Load Balancing
Automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets
Overview
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) 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.
✨ Key Features
- Application Load Balancer (ALB) for HTTP/HTTPS traffic
- Network Load Balancer (NLB) for TCP/UDP traffic
- Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) for third-party virtual appliances
- Health checks to route traffic to healthy targets
- Integration with Auto Scaling
🎯 Key Differentiators
- Fully managed and highly available
- Deep integration with AWS services like Auto Scaling and ECS
- Scales automatically to meet traffic demands
Unique Value: Provides a highly available, scalable, and fully managed load balancing service that is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem, simplifying the process of building fault-tolerant applications.
🎯 Use Cases (5)
✅ Best For
- Distributing web traffic across a fleet of EC2 web servers
- Routing TCP traffic to containerized services running on Amazon ECS
💡 Check With Vendor
Verify these considerations match your specific requirements:
- Global traffic management (use Amazon Route 53 or AWS Global Accelerator instead)
🏆 Alternatives
Eliminates the operational overhead of managing and scaling load balancer infrastructure, which is a significant burden with self-managed solutions like Nginx or F5.
💻 Platforms
🔌 Integrations
🛟 Support Options
- ✓ Email Support
- ✓ Live Chat
- ✓ Phone Support
- ✓ Dedicated Support (Business, Enterprise tier)
🔒 Compliance & Security
💰 Pricing
Free tier: 750 hours per month for an Application Load Balancer and 750 hours for a Network Load Balancer for 12 months.
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