Does it make sense to have an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer with just one EC2 instance

Question

my question is simple. Does it make sense to have an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) with just one EC2 instance?

If I understood right, ELB will switch traffic between EC2 instances. However, I have just one EC2 instance. So, does it make sense?

On the other hand, I´m using Route 53 to route my domain requests domain.com, and www.domain.com to my ELB, and I don´t see how to redirect directly to my EC2 instance. So, do I need an ELB for routing purposes?

Answer 1

• Well you are right Elastic Load Balancer is mainly used to distribute the traffic equally among the instances and route traffic only to Healthy instances

• If you are using single EC2 instance then using Elastic Load Balancer along with it is not a better decision

• You will just end up making an unnecessary expenditure for using ELB

• Instead in case of Single Instance you can make use of Elastic IP to point the domain name to an EC2 instance

The steps to do so are-

1. Go to AWS management console and under compute select EC2 

2. In EC2 console click on Elastic IP in left navigation panel 

3. Acquire a New Address

4. Associate it with your EC2 instance

5. Copy the Elastic IP address and use it in your Route 53 sub-domain

Note: The Elastic IP address can be re-associated with a different EC2 instance later if desired within an AWS account. Every account can have upto 5 Elastic IP's only