What is the primary function of Elastic Load Balancers in AWS?

The primary function of Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) in AWS is to allocate incoming traffic across various targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses. By distributing incoming application traffic, ELBs help ensure that no single resource is overwhelmed, which enhances the availability and fault tolerance of applications.

When an ELB receives incoming requests, it intelligently routes these requests to one of the registered targets based on various algorithms, such as round-robin or least connections. This process not only helps to balance the load but also improves the responsiveness of applications by ensuring that resources are utilized efficiently.

Additionally, ELBs can perform health checks to ensure that traffic is only sent to healthy targets, further contributing to the reliability and stability of the application. By effectively managing traffic distribution, ELBs become an essential part of a well-architected framework in AWS, ensuring optimal resource utilization and maintaining application performance under varying loads.