AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner / Question #1340 of 719

Question #1340

Which capability is a primary advantage of using an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) in AWS?

A

Automatically scaling the number of EC2 instances based on demand.

B

Distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets.

C

Enabling cross-region load balancing for global applications.

D

Managing traffic routing between multiple virtual private clouds.

Explanation

Answer B is correct because the core function of an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is to evenly distribute incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses, to enhance application availability and fault tolerance.

Option A is incorrect because automatically scaling EC2 instances is handled by AWS Auto Scaling, not ELB, though ELB can work in tandem with it. Option C is misleading because cross-region load balancing is not a native capability of ELB; it typically requires using Route 53 or other global services. Option D is incorrect because ELB operates within a single VPC and does not manage traffic between multiple VPCs, which would require VPC peering or Transit Gateway. Key takeaway: ELB's primary purpose is traffic distribution within a region, not scaling, cross-region routing, or inter-VPC communication.

Answer

The correct answer is: B