Question 1

What's the difference between Elastic Load Balancer and Amazon CloudFront?

Accepted Answer

Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming requests to multiple servers (targets) to improve availability and handle more traffic. Amazon CloudFront is a CDN that caches and serves content from edge locations closer to users. A common pattern is CloudFront in front (for caching and global performance) and an ELB behind it (to distribute requests to your application servers).

Question 2

When should I use Elastic Load Balancer?

Accepted Answer

Use ELB when you have more than one backend server (or plan to scale to multiple) and you want automatic traffic distribution, health checks, and higher availability. It’s especially useful for production web apps, APIs, microservices, and any workload where you need to handle variable traffic without overloading a single instance.

Question 3

How much does Elastic Load Balancer cost?

Accepted Answer

ELB pricing depends on the load balancer type (ALB, NLB, GWLB), how long it runs, and how much traffic it processes. Common cost drivers include hourly (or per-time) charges and usage-based metrics (for example, processed bytes, connections, or request-related capacity units depending on the ELB type). You should estimate using the AWS Pricing Calculator and consider additional costs for data transfer and the targets behind the load balancer.

Elastic Load Balancer

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