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 30th, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

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