AWS Technical Essentials Practice

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is designed to intelligently distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, enhancing the availability and fault tolerance of applications. The correct answer highlights the versatility of ELB by indicating that it can distribute traffic across Amazon EC2 instances and other compatible targets.

Amazon EC2 instances are the most commonly used targets as they are virtual servers where applications can run. However, ELB also supports a variety of other target types, such as containers (like those managed by Amazon ECS), IP addresses, and Lambda functions, allowing for a broader range of application architectures. This flexibility enables developers to optimize resource utilization and improve responsiveness.

The other options focus narrowly on specific resource types. For instance, Lambda functions, while they can be invoked by load balancers, do not represent the full range of ELB's capabilities. Similarly, Amazon S3 buckets and database instances are not compatible targets for traffic distribution via ELB. S3 is used for object storage and does not handle traffic in the same way as application servers, while database instances are not designed to manage incoming web requests directly.

Thus, the correct answer emphasizes the comprehensive nature of AWS Elastic Load Balancing in managing traffic across a diverse set of targets, ensuring robust and scalable application