AWS service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers to prevent overload. Like a traffic cop directing cars to different lanes to avoid congestion.
An online shopping site uses Elastic Load Balancer to spread customer requests across multiple servers during peak shopping seasons.
All providers offer managed load balancers that distribute traffic across healthy backends. AWS ELB is a family of load balancers: ALB (Layer 7 HTTP/HTTPS), NLB (Layer 4 TCP/UDP/TLS, high performance), and GWLB (service insertion for network appliances). Azure typically maps to Application Gateway for Layer 7 and Azure Load Balancer for Layer 4. GCP’s Cloud Load Balancing provides global and regional options across Layer 7 and Layer 4. OCI Load Balancer provides Layer 4/7 load balancing with health checks and SSL termination.
Explore real-world architectures from our community that use Elastic Load Balancer: