One of the most significant and useful additions to ELB over the past year has been the introduction of the Application Load Balancer. Unlike its predecessor, the ELB, the Application Load Balancer is a strict Layer 7 (application) load balancer designed to support content-based routing and applications that run on containers as well. The ALB is also designed to provide additional visibility of the health of the target EC2 instances as well as the containers. Ideally, such ALBs would be used to dynamically balance loads across a fleet of containers running scalable web and mobile applications.

This is just the tip of the iceberg compared to the vast plethora of services and functionality that AWS has added to its services in just a span of one year! Let's quickly glance through the various services that we will be covering in this book.