Elastic Load Balancing
A service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets such as EC2 instances.
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets — EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, or Lambda functions — within one or more Availability Zones, improving fault tolerance by routing around unhealthy targets. The main types are Application Load Balancer (ALB) for HTTP/HTTPS at layer 7, Network Load Balancer (NLB) for ultra-low-latency TCP/UDP at layer 4, and Gateway Load Balancer for third-party virtual appliances. For CLF-C02, remember ELB does not add capacity by itself: it distributes traffic across whatever instances exist, while Auto Scaling adds or removes those instances during demand spikes.
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