Elastic Load Balancing allows the distribution of incoming traffic to your Amazon AWS infrastructure across multiple instances. This represents a great tool in avoiding failures in your applications and web traffic. ELB automatically detects fails in your EC2 instances and redirects traffic to other available instances. During this Lab, you will learn to create and use your first ELB instance to balance the HTTP traffic between two EC2 instances. You will also gain a valuable understanding of the Classic Load Balancer behavior during an instance outage.
Please note: AWS will be retiring the EC2-Classic network and Classic Load Balancers in August 2022. You can still complete this lab to learn about them. However, you won't be expected to know about Classic Load Balancers to pass any certifications. After August 2022 use of Classic Load Balancers will no longer be recommended by AWS.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this Lab, you should be able to:
- Create and configure a Classic Load Balancer
- Add existing EC2 instances and a Classic Load Balancer
- Restrict direct access to EC2 instances using Security Groups
Prerequisites
This is a beginner level Lab, however, in order to follow the next steps you should be able to:
- Describe and launch EC2 instances
- Describe and create a VPC
- Describe, create, and configure Security Groups
Updates
October 12th, 2021 - Updated instructions to reflect the latest user-interface changes
September 1st, 2020 - Updated most screenshots and instructions
January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab
September 19th, 2018 - Updated images due to compatibility with the new UI
Eric Magalhães has a strong background as a Systems Engineer for both Windows and Linux systems and, currently, work as a DevOps Consultant for Embratel. Lazy by nature, he is passionate about automation and anything that can make his job painless, thus his interest in topics like coding, configuration management, containers, CI/CD and cloud computing went from a hobby to an obsession. Currently, he holds multiple AWS certifications and, as a DevOps Consultant, helps clients to understand and implement the DevOps culture in their environments, besides that, he play a key role in the company developing pieces of automation using tools such as Ansible, Chef, Packer, Jenkins and Docker.