What is one purpose of Amazon Elastic Load Balancing?

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is designed specifically to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. This capability ensures that no single resource becomes overwhelmed with traffic, enhancing the availability and reliability of applications. By balancing the load, it helps maintain consistent performance, especially during peak usage times.

This distribution process allows for efficient utilization of resources and can lead to improved fault tolerance. If one target fails, the load balancer will automatically route traffic to healthy targets, thus minimizing downtime for users. Moreover, this functionality plays a crucial role in scalability, as organizations can add or remove resources as needed without disrupting the flow of traffic.

The other options, while important in cloud technology, do not align with the primary purpose of Elastic Load Balancing. For instance, storing large datasets, managing server instances automatically, and encrypting data at rest pertain to different aspects of cloud services and functionalities that are not directly related to the primary function of managing application traffic.