How does AWS Elastic Load Balancing function?

AWS Elastic Load Balancing is designed to automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. This capability enhances the availability and fault tolerance of applications by ensuring that no single target is overwhelmed with too much traffic. By balancing the load, Elastic Load Balancing helps improve responsiveness and increases the overall reliability of applications running in the AWS cloud.

The load balancer intelligently routes incoming requests based on various algorithms and optimizes the usage of resources, which allows for seamless scaling when there are changes in demand. Moreover, Elastic Load Balancing can detect unhealthy instances and automatically reroute traffic to healthy targets, ensuring continuous operational performance.

In contrast, other options such as providing a virtual environment for running databases, storing and retrieving large files, or scheduling background tasks do not describe the primary functionality of Elastic Load Balancing. These options pertain to different AWS services, which serve specific purposes but are not related to the role of distributing application traffic.