What if ELB itself fails

Question

We use Load balancers to have a back up when our resources crash but what if, in situations like these, the ELB itself fails? Is this possible? If yes, what happens then?

Answer 1

Something like has actually happened before in 2012 where a portion of ELB state data was logically deleted and customers were not able to manage their load balancers. Funny thing, they were able to create new load balancer but not able to manage the existing ones. The entire article explains the event in detail.

But in such situations, there are three possible ways to get out of it:

• Wait for AWS to restore service
• Route traffic directly to instance public IPs or elastic IPs if available
• Move your app and traffic to a different region or different provider

Answer 2

This is the exact same reason why AWS provides multiple load balancers in different availability zones. You can enable cross-zone load balancing and hence if one load balancer there will still be another in another availability zone.

Comments

What is cross-zone load balancing?

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I've explained here. Have a look at my answer here.