I’m quite pleased to see one more course on Elastic Load Balancer on AWS, specifically a new one to learn ELB. Many of you beloved members of CloudAcademy are still in the early phase of learning AWS, and we are getting good feedback about our growing library of beginner courses that help you understand the foundations of a big and important provider like AWS. ELB is another central service of AWS, so I’m sure you’ll like to see it available at least as much as I did.
The topic of load balancers is quite huge and important too. Chances are that you know it already, as they are a tool in use since long before AWS was even started. Nevertheless, they are finding a new life in the cloud world, as they play a major role in increasing the performance and availability of your infrastructure, helping a lot in designing and building fault-tolerant architectures, especially when combined with Auto Scaling.
Learn AWS Elastic Load Balancer on Cloud Academy
This new course about ELB will tell you how to get started with this important service. Your instructor David will start with an introduction showing you all the basic concepts about ELB. It’s important to know how it works with regard to regions, AZs, endpoints, and what not, so this initial theoretical lecture is an important one to better understand the next. And in fact, it’s immediately followed by a set of Teaching Points to help you strengthen the main concepts of what you have learned so far.
The second part is all hands-on, and you will see how to create an actual Load Balancer and how it works. There are two main types of load balancers: Internet-facing and VPC-facing. The former is the classic one that gets the connection from the Internet and routes it to the balanced servers according to the balancing algorithms used by ELB. The latter is an internal balance that has many different use cases. The two important lectures crafted by David will show you why VPC-facing can be relevant and meaningful in many situations. Eventually, the final lecture is about the CLI, a nice addition to what you have learned so far in case you need to control your balancers programmatically via the terminal.
As you can read on the Load Balancing course, although this is a beginner-oriented tutorial, some knowledge about EC2, VPC, and AWS, in general, might help you better understand everything shown here. Anyway, I strongly recommend you to follow up this tutorial with the Cloud Academy’s course How to Architect with a Design for Failure Approach, where you can see a nice example of interaction between ELB, Auto Scaling, and many other AWS services to make a cloud infrastructure being fault-tolerant and resilient even to severe issues. It’s a great course, and it tells a lot about real-life scenarios where ELB is used.
