Elastic Load Balancing
Developer Guide (API Version 2011-11-15)
Print this pageEmail this pageGo to the ForumsView the PDFShare this page on TwitterShare this page on FacebookBookmark this page on DeliciousSubmit this page to RedditSubmit this page to DiggDid this page help you?  Yes  No   Tell us about it...

What Is Elastic Load Balancing and Why Do I Need It?

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. You can use load balancing to achieve fault tolerance in your applications and seamlessly provide the amount of load balancing capacity you need in response to incoming application traffic.

Why Do I Need Elastic Load Balancing?

As the traffic to your website increases, you might want to consider running your web application on multiple instances to make sure your website stays highly available. So a single URL, such as www.example.com, would represent several instances of your running website. If your site experiences a significant increase in traffic and don't use multiple instances your customers might experience delays when accessing your site, or they might not be able to access your site at all. Elastic Load Balancing makes it easy to scale its request handling capacity in response to incoming traffic.

When you are running multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances of your web application, you need to consider the most efficient way to manage the routing of incoming requests to all those instances. Elastic Load Balancing provides a cost-effective and easy-to-use way to automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.