Load Balancing in AWS: Part I
Learn about ELB in AWS and the Application Load Balancer.
We'll cover the following...
Elastic Load Balancers
Load balancers are devices that simply distribute network traffic to servers. They serve as a single point of contact for customers while redirecting them to any number of servers in the backend.
We can view websites deployed to EC2 via the IP address of the EC2 instance. If we horizontally scale this application to two instances, we’ll have two public IPs of two instances. To reach these instances, we’ll need to enter both IP addresses in our browsers one by one. This is where load balancers come in. We can have any number of EC2 instances, on-site servers, or AWS services in the backend. The clients can reach all these services directly via the load balancers.
AWS offers Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) to distribute network traffic across EC2 instances, AWS Lambdas, and ECS containers. ELBs are preconfigured servers from AWS that can distribute traffic to multiple AWS services across multiple AZs.
Note: We can create a load balancer on an EC2 for custom requirements. But by using ELBs, we don’t have to configure and maintain new load balancer servers of our own and can utilize the vast set of features that ELBs offer.
Health checks
ELBs monitor the health of their registered targets and only send traffic to healthy targets. For ...