ACloud Guru Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exam

When should an Elastic Load Balancer be used?

1. For storing and retrieving data

2. When distributing traffic to multiple EC2 instances

3. For configuring network connections

4. To centrally manage application deployment

The correct answer is: When distributing traffic to multiple EC2 instances

An Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is specifically designed to distribute incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances to ensure high availability and fault tolerance. By evenly distributing traffic, an ELB helps to prevent any single instance from becoming overwhelmed with requests, which can lead to slow performance or downtime. This is particularly important in the context of scalable architectures where the number of instances may change dynamically based on the demand. When traffic is effectively balanced, it enhances the overall performance of applications, ensures a more reliable user experience, and can lead to better resource utilization within a cloud environment. Additionally, if one EC2 instance fails, the load balancer can seamlessly redirect traffic to the remaining healthy instances, ensuring continued service availability. The other options refer to functionalities that do not directly relate to the purpose of an Elastic Load Balancer. For instance, storage and retrieval of data is handled by services like Amazon S3 or Amazon RDS, while configuring network connections is more aligned with Amazon VPC. Centrally managing application deployment typically involves tools like AWS CodeDeploy or AWS Elastic Beanstalk, rather than an Elastic Load Balancer.