What feature does Amazon EC2 provide to ensure high availability of applications?

Amazon EC2 provides Elastic Load Balancing to ensure high availability of applications by distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances. This distribution helps to prevent a single instance from becoming a bottleneck, enhancing the overall redundancy and reliability of the application. If one instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances, thereby maintaining application availability and performance.

In addition, Elastic Load Balancing can efficiently handle varying levels of incoming traffic, which is especially useful for applications experiencing fluctuating loads. By automatically adjusting to changes in traffic, it ensures that user requests are handled promptly and reduces the risk of application downtime.

While Auto Scaling is closely related to maintaining application availability by automatically adjusting the number of EC2 instances in response to traffic demands, it necessitates a load balancer to effectively manage and distribute that traffic. AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated network connections to AWS, which does not directly relate to high availability features, and AWS Backup focuses on data protection rather than application availability.