EC2 with Load Balancers

To ensure your web application can handle traffic effectively, we combine EC2 instances (virtual servers) with an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). The ELB distributes incoming traffic among multiple EC2 instances, preventing overload and improving your application's availability. This architecture is ideal for traditional applications that require full control over the server environment.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is the backbone of any AWS infrastructure. It allows you to run virtual servers – the "instances" – in the cloud. Think of it as your virtual data center, where you can choose the operating system, processing power (CPU), memory (RAM), and disk storage according to your application's needs.

With EC2, you have the flexibility to:

• Scalability: Launch and terminate instances as needed, paying only for the time you use.
• Full Control: Root access to the operating system, allowing you to install any software and configure the environment as you wish.
• Variety of Instances: Choose from a wide range of instance types optimized for different workloads – from general purpose to compute-intensive.

Imagine your applications running on EC2 instances, each one being an independent server. But how do you ensure traffic is distributed equally among them and that if one fails, the others keep running? That's where the Application Load Balancer comes in.

The Application Load Balancer (ALB) acts as a single entry point for your application's traffic, distributing incoming requests among multiple EC2 instances. It operates at layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) of the OSI model, meaning it can inspect the request content to make smarter routing decisions.

• High Availability: If an EC2 instance fails, the ALB automatically stops sending traffic to it and redirects to healthy instances, ensuring your application stays online.
• Automatic Scalability: Together with the Auto Scaling Group, the ALB can trigger the launch of new EC2 instances when demand increases and terminate them when demand decreases, optimizing costs and performance.
• Smart Routing: It can route requests to different instance groups (Target Groups) based on URL (path-based routing) or domain (host-based routing), allowing multiple services to run on a single ALB.

How does the ALB help your architecture?

Using Amazon EC2 together with the Application Load Balancer is a robust strategy for building modern, high-performance applications on AWS cloud, providing a superior experience for your users and greater peace of mind for your IT team.

• Resilience: Your application keeps running even if one or more instances fail.
• Scalability: Automatically handles traffic spikes, ensuring consistent performance.
• Cost efficiency: Pay only for the resources you use, scaling up and down as needed.
• Simplified maintenance: Perform updates or maintenance on individual instances without service interruption.