Elastic Load Balancing & Auto Scaling (AWS)
Elastic Load Balancing & Auto Scaling (AWS)
Website owners having a large database always want to provide their users a seamless experience on their website. In any case they do not want the customers to get impacted and for this they always try to ensure that their system handles the spike in load, sudden failure, recovery from a failure effectively.
Elastic Load Balancing is a perfect solution for such website owners. ELB is a load balancing service for Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployment. ELB automatically divides the incoming traffic and scales the resources to meet the traffic requirements. In a layman term, this can be understood as dividing the work that a single computer need to do among multiple computers.
AWS ‘Auto Scaling’ feature can be used to make sure that there are enough EC2 instances running behind an ELB. Auto Scaling ensures, you are using the correct number of EC2 instances available to handle the load of your application. In Auto Scaling EC2 instances are grouped and treated as logical units for scaling. While creating an Auto Scaling groups 3 main parameters are defined:
- Desired Capacity
- Minimum number of instances
- Maximum number of instances
Benefits of using Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling
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High Fault Tolerance:
An unhealthy instance is detected, terminated and replaced intelligently by a new instance. Health of instances is continuously monitored and requests are sent only to the healthy instances.
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Better Load Distribution:
Requests are distributed to multiple available EC2 instances.
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Secure:
Has end-to-end traffic encryption on those networks which are using secure (HTTPS/SSL) connections.
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High Availability:
It is always ensured that application has the right amount of instances to handle the traffic demands.
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Better Cost Management:
Money is saved as instances are launched when they are actually required and terminated when they are not needed.