Cloud with DJ

Imagine you own a very popular taco shop in town. One night, a huge crowd shows up, all wanting your delicious tacos at the same time. If you had only one cook, that cook would get overwhelmed, orders would get delayed, and customers would get frustrated and leave.

Because you prepared, you have a team of cooks in your kitchen. To manage the crowd, you hire a restaurant manager named ELOB. His job is to stand at the entrance and direct each customer to the next available cook. If one cook is busy, he sends the customer to another. If a cook gets tired or makes a mistake (like a server going down), ELOB notices and stops sending customers to that cook until they’re ready again. This way, every customer gets their taco without long waits, and no single cook gets overwhelmed.

Elob also makes sure that if more customers keep coming, and you decide to bring in extra cooks (scaling up your servers), he starts directing traffic to them smoothly, without anyone even noticing the change. Plus, he checks everyone’s order to ensure they’re genuine customers, adding a layer of security to the operation.

This is exactly how Elastic Load Balancer works. Elob is like the ELB for your website or application, ensuring that everything runs efficiently, smoothly, and securely, even during the busiest times. ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across one or more Availability Zones.

ELB supports four types of load balancers: Application Load Balancer (ALB), Network Load Balancer (NLB), Classic Load Balancer (CLB), and Gateway Load Balancer (GLB).

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) supports four types of load balancers. You can select the appropriate load balancer based on your application needs. If you need to load balance HTTP requests, we recommend you use the Application Load Balancer (ALB). For network/transport protocols (layer4 – TCP, UDP) load balancing, and for extreme performance/low latency applications we recommend using Network Load Balancer. If your application is built within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Classic network, you should use Classic Load Balancer. If you need to deploy and run third-party virtual appliances, you can use Gateway Load Balancer.

And you, what’s your experience with ELB?