What does the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) do in Cloud Operations?

The Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) plays a crucial role in ensuring high availability and reliability in cloud operations by distributing incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. This distribution helps to balance the load among the targets, which prevents any single target from being overwhelmed by too much traffic. By effectively managing traffic distribution, the ELB enhances application availability and provides redundancy, ensuring that if one target fails, traffic can still be routed to healthy targets.

In addition to improving performance and reliability, the ELB also provides features like SSL termination, which can offload the SSL decryption from the targets, and it allows for sticky sessions, which enable user sessions to be maintained with specific targets. Overall, the ELB ensures that applications remain responsive and accessible to users, which is essential in cloud operations.