What is Elastic Load Balancing?

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets such as EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It provides three types of load balancers: Application Load Balancer for HTTP/HTTPS traffic, Network Load Balancer for ultra-high performance TCP/UDP traffic, and Classic Load Balancer for legacy applications. ELB monitors the health of registered targets and routes traffic only to healthy targets. It scales automatically to handle varying traffic loads and integrates with Auto Scaling to ensure application availability.