What is a key benefit of using an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) with applications running on AWS?

The primary benefit of an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is its ability to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, in one or more Availability Zones. This improves application availability and fault tolerance by ensuring no single instance is overwhelmed and that traffic can be rerouted if an instance fails. While an ELB does scale automatically to handle traffic, its core function is distribution, making "distribute incoming traffic across multiple compute resources" the most direct and encompassing benefit. ELBs operate within a single AWS Region, not across multiple regions. They balance traffic to compute resources, not between internet gateways.