Why Use a Load Balancer?

• Distribute traffic evenly across multiple instances to prevent overload.

• Present a single DNS entry for your application.

• Detect unhealthy instances and route traffic only to healthy ones.

• Offload SSL/TLS termination to the load balancer.

• Support stickiness using cookies to bind a client to a specific instance.

• Improve high availability by spanning multiple Availability Zones.

• Segregate public and private traffic if needed.

Why Use an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)?

• Fully managed: AWS handles upgrades, scaling, and availability.

• Integrated with AWS services:
• EC2, Auto Scaling Groups, ECS
• AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for SSL certificates
• CloudWatch for monitoring
• Route 53, AWS WAF, AWS Global Accelerator

• Minimal operational overhead compared to self-managed load balancers.

• While a self-hosted solution might have lower direct costs, it requires significantly more maintenance effort.