Description

AWS Elastic Load Balancer distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets to ensure high availability and fault tolerance.

Features

• Automatic scaling to handle varying workloads
• Health checks for backend instances
• SSL/TLS termination and processing
• Support for multiple protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP)
• Integration with AWS services like EC2, ECS, and Lambda
• Cross-zone load balancing
• Free automatic scaling on DDoS

Limitations

• Limited customization of load balancing algorithms
• No support for static IP addresses (except Network Load Balancer)
• Region-specific deployment
• Fixed quota on number of load balancers per account
• Potential for additional data transfer costs

Use Cases

• High-traffic web application load distribution across multiple EC2 instances for improved performance and availability
• SSL offloading for microservices architecture, handling encryption/decryption at the load balancer level