Load balancers are an important part of any network infrastructure, and they are especially important when it comes to cloud computing. In Amazon Web Services (AWS), there are two types of load balancers: the Classic Load Balancer and the Application Load Balancer.
The Classic Load Balancer is the older of the two and is best suited for simple load balancing of traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, while the Application Load Balancer is more suited for load balancing of HTTP and HTTPS traffic and provides advanced request routing, content-based routing, and ability to bind to multiple Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) certificates.
One of the key benefits of using a load balancer in AWS is that it automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in one or more Availability Zones. This helps to ensure that your application is highly available and can handle a large amount of traffic.
Load balancers in AWS also have built-in failover capabilities, which means that if one target becomes unavailable, the load balancer will automatically route traffic to the remaining available targets. This helps to prevent any single point of failure in your network infrastructure.
In addition to distributing incoming traffic, load balancers can also be used to offload CPU-intensive tasks, such as SSL/TLS termination, HTTP/HTTPS header processing, and compression. This can help to improve the performance of your application and reduce the load on your servers.
Overall, load balancers are an essential part of any cloud infrastructure, and AWS provides a range of options to suit different needs and use cases. Whether you are running a simple web application or a complex microservices architecture, there is a load balancer in AWS that can help you deliver a highly available and scalable service to your users.