Getting Started with Amazon Elastic Load Balancer

Load balancing is a critical component of any cloud system, contributing significantly to the availability of cloud-based services for customers, end users, and business partners. The technique guarantees that workloads are distributed among several servers, which is known as a server cluster. 

Load balancing, as the name implies, prevents any individual server from becoming overloaded and perhaps breaking down.

What is a Load Balancer ?

A load balancer is a hardware or software solution that distributes network traffic over numerous servers or virtual machines in order to optimize resource consumption, assure high availability, and improve application and service performance.

Load balancers function as a traffic manager or intermediate between the client and the server, accepting incoming traffic requests and directing them to one of multiple servers depending on a set of predetermined rules. Load balancers may distribute traffic depending on a variety of criteria, including round-robin, least connections, IP affinity, and application layer content.

Load balancers can boost application performance and availability by spreading traffic over numerous servers or virtual machines, preventing any one server from being overloaded or unavailable. They can also enable scalability by dynamically adding or deleting servers based on demand.

Load balancers are frequently used in online applications, e-commerce sites, and other services requiring high availability, scalability, and performance. Depending on the organization's needs, they can be deployed as physical appliances, virtual computers, or cloud-based services.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)

Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is a cloud-based load balancing service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It distributes incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances or containers within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability for applications.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing, or ELB, guarantees that inbound application traffic is automatically distributed over many destinations, like as containers, virtual appliances, Amazon EC2 instances, Lambda functions, and IP addresses. 

AWS ELB might help manage the constantly changing load of application traffic in a single or several Availability Zones. Elastic Load Balancing on Amazon offers four separate load balancer versions with automated scalability, high availability, and naturally tough security for improved application fault-tolerance.

Fig 1.1-Amazon Elastic Load Balancer

There are generally two types of Load Balancer we are using and these are :

Application Load Balancer
An Application Load Balancer handles application layer (HTTP/HTTPS) routing decisions, enables path-based routing, and may route requests to one or more ports on each container instance in your cluster. Dynamic host port mapping is supported by application load balancers.

Network Load Balancer
A Network Load Balancer decides on routing at the transport layer (TCP/SSL). It is capable of handling millions of queries per second. When the load balancer gets a connection, it uses a flow hash routing algorithm to choose a target from the target group for the default rule. It tries to connect to the selected target via TCP on the port given in the listener settings. It sends the request without changing the headers. Dynamic host port mapping is supported by network load balancers.

Features and capabilities

• Amazon ELB distributes traffic across multiple EC2 instances or containers, ensuring that applications are highly available and resilient to failures.
• Amazon ELB can automatically scale up or down based on the demand for applications, providing flexibility and cost efficiency.
• Amazon ELB provides security features such as SSL offloading, inbound NAT rules, and network security groups to secure applications and data.
• Amazon ELB monitors the health of EC2 instances or containers and can automatically route traffic to healthy instances, ensuring optimal application performance.
• Amazon ELB can be integrated with other AWS services such as Auto Scaling, Route 53, and AWS Certificate Manager to provide a complete load balancing and application delivery solution.
• Amazon ELB offers a range of management and monitoring features, including a web-based interface, AWS CLI, and AWS CloudWatch.

Amazon ELB is a dependable and scalable load balancing solution that offers complex routing features as well as high-performance load balancing for AWS-hosted applications. It is a useful alternative for enterprises that need a flexible and cost-effective cloud load balancing solution.

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