what is load balancer in aws

Quick Scoop: An AWS load balancer is a service that spreads incoming traffic across multiple servers or targets so your app stays fast, available, and less likely to fail under heavy use.

What it does

It acts like a front door for your application, sending requests to healthy backend targets such as EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, or Lambda functions.

If one target becomes unhealthy, the load balancer stops routing traffic to it and keeps requests flowing to the others.

AWS also manages scaling for the load balancer as traffic changes, so you do not have to manually resize it for most workloads.

Why people use it

• Improves availability by avoiding a single point of failure.

• Handles traffic spikes more smoothly by distributing requests across multiple targets.

• Helps with routing rules, health checks, and more efficient traffic management.

Common AWS types

• Application Load Balancer (ALB): Best for HTTP and HTTPS traffic, especially web apps, APIs, and microservices. It can route by path, host, or content rules.

• Network Load Balancer (NLB): Built for very high performance at the transport layer, often used for TCP and UDP traffic.

• Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB): Used for deploying and scaling virtual appliances like firewalls and network security tools.

Simple example

If you run an online store on three EC2 instances, an AWS load balancer can send each visitor to one of the healthy instances instead of overloading just one server.

That makes the site more resilient if traffic suddenly increases or one instance crashes.

Meta description

AWS load balancer is a managed service that distributes incoming traffic across healthy targets to improve availability, scalability, and performance.