4.41 What is load balancing

Load balancing is a crucial component in any cloud computing infrastructure. It is a process of distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure that no single server is overwhelmed with too much traffic. This ensures that the workload is distributed evenly across multiple servers, which results in better performance, increased availability and improved resilience.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a range of load balancing options to meet the needs of different applications and workloads. The Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service provides a fully managed load balancing solution that automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. ELB offers three types of load balancers: Application Load Balancer (ALB), Network Load Balancer (NLB), and Classic Load Balancer (CLB).

The Application Load Balancer is designed for modern HTTP/HTTPS applications and provides advanced routing features such as content-based routing, host-based routing, and path-based routing. The Network Load Balancer is designed for high throughput, low latency applications such as TCP/UDP traffic and provides ultra-low latency and high scalability. The Classic Load Balancer provides basic load balancing features and is suitable for applications that do not require advanced routing features.

In addition to these load balancing options, AWS also offers Auto Scaling, which automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances based on the demand. This ensures that the application can handle sudden spikes in traffic without any downtime.

Overall, load balancing is an essential component of any cloud computing infrastructure, and AWS offers a range of load balancing options to meet the needs of different applications and workloads.