Just one week ago we announced the availability of a new Hands-on Lab. It was about AWS RDS, the Relational DBMS in the Amazon cloud system, and it got a huge success: so many of you started learning RDS by doing real things on real cloud resources thanks to our lab. Today we are launching a brand new lab about Elastic Load Balancer, which will help you learn AWS ELB the effective way: hands on the AWS Console, and aided by our exclusive progress tracking technology that will help you going further if you get stuck at something.
ELB is another central service of AWS. It automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, enabling greater levels of fault tolerance and high availability of your application. It actually has many more use cases, like acting as an entry point for your VPC, handling DNS failover, and of course working together with AutoScaling, a very common coupling even in small infrastructure.
The first step of this lab will ask you to create a new Elastic Load Balancer and bind it to a few EC2 instances. As always with our labs, you will be doing your stuff on another tab where the AWS Console is open. The lab engine will check your progress and will move you to the next step as soon as you are done. Once done, you need to configure the security group to allow inbound connections: your ELB will be pretty useless otherwise! Your instances are now accessible from the web through the ELB, so how about letting one of them fail and see what happens? This is the task you are asked to do in the fourth step. As you see, your application will keep working on the other instances even if one of them suddenly shuts down. Finally, the last step will ask you to destroy them
Elastic Load Balancer to complete your lab experience.
Check Cloud Academy’s Upcoming Training Library to learn more about the upcoming new labs: the next one planned is about EBS, and will be out in a couple of weeks!
