What is the primary function of a load balancer in AWS?

The primary function of a load balancer in AWS is to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances or containers. This distribution ensures that no single instance or resource becomes overwhelmed with too much traffic while others remain underutilized. By balancing the load, the load balancer enhances the availability and reliability of applications, as it can route incoming requests to healthy instances and improve response times by using the available resources efficiently.

In addition to balancing traffic, load balancers can also provide features like SSL termination, health checks, and support for sticky sessions, making them a vital component in maintaining application performance and user experience. These capabilities help in managing varying loads effectively, ensuring high availability and scalability for applications hosted on AWS.