What is a benefit of using Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)?

Using Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) provides the crucial benefit of distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses. This load distribution ensures that no single target becomes overwhelmed with too much traffic, which can lead to performance degradation or downtime. By efficiently assigning traffic based on current load and health of the resources, ELB enhances the availability and scalability of applications. It allows for seamless scaling, meaning that as demand increases or decreases, additional targets can be added or removed without impacting the overall user experience.

Moreover, this capability is essential for maintaining high availability and fault tolerance in cloud environments, as traffic can be redirected to healthy targets in the event of failure or maintenance, thus minimizing service interruption. This results in a more resilient application architecture and improves the overall user experience.

Other options relate to functionalities that are not associated with ELB. For example, continuous database backups pertain to services like AWS Backup or RDS automated backups, while network security functions resemble capabilities of services like Security Groups or Network ACLs in a VPC, and optimizing storage in S3 buckets involves using lifecycle policies and cost management strategies rather than load balancing.