What is ELB in AWS ?

ELB stands for Elastic Load Balancing, which is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It ensures that the application traffic is handled efficiently and can scale to meet demand.

Here's a brief overview of what ELB offers:

1. *Distribution of Traffic:* ELB helps in distributing the incoming application or network traffic across multiple computing resources, improving the overall efficiency and fault tolerance of applications.

2. *High Availability:* It automatically routes traffic to available instances across multiple Availability Zones, reducing the risk that an outage in one zone will affect the overall performance of the application.

3. *Scalability:* Elastic Load Balancing can scale your load balancer as traffic to your application changes over time, which can be automated or manually configured.

4. *Types of Load Balancers:* AWS offers three types of load balancers that suit different use cases:

   - *Application Load Balancer (ALB):* Best for HTTP and HTTPS traffic, providing advanced request routing targeted at delivery of modern application architectures, including microservices and containers.

   - *Network Load Balancer (NLB):* Optimized for TCP, UDP, and TLS traffic where extreme performance is required.

   - *Classic Load Balancer (CLB):* Provides basic load balancing across multiple Amazon EC2 instances and operates at both the request level and connection level.

5. *Health Checks:* ELB can perform health checks on the computing resources behind it, ensuring that it only sends traffic to the healthy ones.

6. *Security Features:* It works with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to enable SSL/TLS for your websites and applications, offering secure and encrypted connections.

7. *Integration with AWS Services:* Elastic Load Balancing integrates well with Amazon CloudWatch for metrics and monitoring, AWS Auto Scaling for elasticity, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for security.

Elastic Load Balancing is a key component for building resilient and scalable web applications on AWS.