AWS Solutions Architect Associate Practice Test

Which AWS service allows for load balancing of incoming application traffic?

1. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

2. AWS CloudFront

3. AWS EC2

4. AWS RDS

The correct answer is: AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is the service specifically designed to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. It helps ensure that no single target becomes overwhelmed, enhancing the availability and fault tolerance of applications. By balancing the load, ELB increases the capacity for incoming requests and helps maintain optimal performance even during peak traffic periods. In contrast, AWS CloudFront primarily serves as a content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the delivery of websites, APIs, and other web content by caching copies at edge locations globally. While it may help in improving performance, it does not perform load balancing in the same way ELB does. AWS EC2 is the service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud but does not manage incoming traffic directly. Instead, it serves as the resource that can be behind a load balancer. AWS RDS is a managed relational database service that handles database needs, such as storage and retrieval of data, rather than managing incoming application traffic. In summary, the ability of AWS Elastic Load Balancing to effectively manage and balance incoming application traffic across multiple servers is what distinguishes it as the correct choice.