load balancer

A load balancer is a combination of a DNS name and a set of ports, which together provide a destination for all requests intended for your application. A load balancer can distribute traffic to multiple application instances across every Availability Zone within a region. Load balancers can span multiple Availability Zones within an Amazon EC2 region, but they cannot span multiple regions.

A type of networking switch that is able to utilize additional information beyond a simple destination MAC/IP address to distribute, or load balance, incoming requests across servers or caches according to various algorithms.