Elastic Load Balancing
Developer Guide (API Version 2012-06-01)
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Elastic Load Balancing Developer Guide

Welcome to the Elastic Load Balancing Developer Guide. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides Elastic Load Balancing to automatically distribute your incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. It detects unhealthy instances and reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. Elastic Load Balancing automatically scales its request handling capacity in response to incoming traffic.

The Elastic Load Balancing Developer Guide gives you basic information about Elastic Load Balancing so you can make an informed decision about choosing to use it. This guide also helps you decide how to use Elastic Load Balancing in specific user scenarios. You can choose which one is right for you.

Before You Begin

How Do I... Relevant Topics

Learn about the business case for Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing product information

Learn about how Elastic Load Balancing works and decide whether Elastic Load Balancing is the right choice for my use case

What is Elastic Load Balancing?

Where Do I Start?

We recommend that you read What is Elastic load Balancing to get answers to your question on basics. Then, to familiarize yourself with Elastic Load Balancing, you should walk through Get Started with Elastic Load Balancing. This tutorial will show you how to create a basic load balancer.

If you are a new AWS customer, you are eligible to use the free usage tier for twelve months following your AWS sign-up date. The free tier includes 750 hours per month of Amazon EC2 Micro Instance usage, and 750 hours per month of Elastic Load Balancing, plus 15 GB of data processing.

Where Do I... Relevant Topics

Learn if I am eligible to use the free usage tier for twelve months following my AWS sign-up date

AWS Free Usage Tier

Learn how to create a basic load balancer and register my Amazon EC2 instances with the load balancer

Get Started With Elastic Load Balancing

If you've used load balancing in a physical hardware environment, you'll know how to evaluate the behavior of the load balancer in that context. If you are planning to use load balancing in a cloud environment, you need to be aware of some of the Elastic Load Balancing features that might affect your load balancing scenario.

Elastic Load Balancing supports the load balancing of applications using HTTP, HTTPS (secure HTTP), TCP, and SSL (secure TCP) listener protocols and allows you to choose the protocols for both the front-end (client to load balancer) and the back-end (load balancer to back-end instance) connections.

Elastic Load Balancing provides several different interfaces you can use to manage your load balancers. You can create, access, and manage your load balancers using the AWS Management Console, the command line interface (CLI), or the Query API. You will have to install command line interface and the Query API before you can use them.

Where Do I ... Relevant Topics

Learn about the best practices you can use to evaluate and test Elastic Load Balancing for your use case

Best practices in Evaluating Elastic Load Balancing

Learn about the different listener protocols supported by Elastic Load Balancing

Configure Listeners for Your Load Balancer

Learn how to install the interfaces needed for accessing the Elastic Load Balancing

Get Set Up with Elastic Load Balancing Interfaces

How Do I Use Elastic Load Balancing?

Elastic Load Balancing provides several features that help you load balance your applications effectively. You can create and use your load balancer either for Amazon EC2 or within Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), depending on where you've launched your EC2 instances.

Where Do I... Relevant Topics

Learn more about how to use the various features supported by Elastic Load Balancing

Using Elastic Load Balancing

Learn more about scenarios specific to my instances launched in Amazon EC2

Deploy Elastic Load Balancing in Amazon EC2-Classic

Learn more about scenarios specific to my instances launched in Amazon VPC

Deploy Elastic Load Balancing in Amazon VPC

Learn about potential causes and steps you can take to narrow down and resolve issues with Elastic Load Balancing

Troubleshoot Elastic Load Balancing