A Load Balancer is a critical component in cloud computing and network architecture. Its primary function is to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers or resources to ensure efficient utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overloading any single server or resource.
In the context of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a Load Balancer is a service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses, in multiple availability zones. AWS offers several types of Load Balancers, including Classic Load Balancer (CLB), Application Load Balancer (ALB), and Network Load Balancer (NLB), each designed to meet specific use cases and performance requirements.
Key features of AWS Load Balancers include health checks, which monitor the health of registered targets and route traffic only to healthy targets, and automatic scaling, which adjusts the load balancer’s capacity based on incoming traffic patterns.
In summary, a Load Balancer in AWS plays a crucial role in ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability of applications by efficiently distributing incoming traffic across multiple resources.