An Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) has the ability to scale load balancers and applications based on real-time traffic automatically. Due to elasticity, it’s usually implemented as a software load balancer. It uses system health checks to learn the status of application pool members (application servers) and routes traffic appropriately to available servers, manages fail-over to high availability targets, or automatically spin-up additional capacity.
What is Elastic Load Balancing?
Elastic Load Balancing scales traffic to an application as demand changes over time. It also scales load balancing instances automatically and on-demand. As elastic load balancing uses request routing algorithms to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple instances or scale them as necessary, it increases the fault tolerance of your applications.
How Does an Elastic Load Balancer Work?
Elastic Load Balancing scales your load balancer as traffic to your servers change. It routes incoming application traffic across instances automatically. The elastic load balancer acts as the point of contact to incoming traffic, and by monitoring the health of instances, the elastic load balancing service can send the traffic requests to healthy instances.
Does VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Offer a Elastic Load Balancer?
Yes. The VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer features an 100% software elastic load balancer that can scale automatically via the built-in application performance monitoring capabilities in the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer. With on-demand scaling of load balancers and the ability to trigger the scaling of backend application servers through ecosystem integrations with orchestration platforms, the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer delivers a better end user experience. By scaling up or down automatically in response to traffic patterns, the platform eliminates the common practices of over-provisioning application load balancing capacity that is a challenge with hardware, appliance-based load balancers.
For more on the actual implementation of load balancers, check out our Application Delivery How-To Videos or watch Scaling Out Load Balancing in vCenter How To Video here:
For more information on elastic load balancers see the following resources: