AWS Solutions Architect Associate Practice Test 2025 - Free Practice Questions and Study Guide

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is the feature that allows for the distribution of incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses. It helps ensure that no single resource is overwhelmed with too much traffic, optimizing the use of resources and improving application reliability.

With ELB, you can manage the load for your applications automatically. It provides various types of load balancers (Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, and Classic Load Balancer) that cater to different application needs and traffic patterns. For example, the Application Load Balancer operates at the application layer (Layer 7) and is well-suited for handling HTTP/HTTPS traffic, allowing for advanced routing features, while the Network Load Balancer functions at the transport layer (Layer 4), ideal for dealing with sudden and volatile traffic patterns due to its high throughput and low latency.

This capability is crucial for ensuring application availability and scalability, as it routes traffic to healthy instances and can automatically adjust traffic distribution in real-time as the demand fluctuates.

Other options, while relevant to AWS, do not specifically provide the functionality of distributing incoming application traffic as effectively as ELB does. For example, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling focuses on automatically