aws elastic load balancer not distributing

Question

At work we're trying to set up our load balancer with amazon aws. We have two instances, one instance is made from an ami from the first instance.

We only have time to use the AWS GUI right now. We also currently have one instance associated with the route 53 DNS. What was happening was once that instance started failing, the load was not rolling over to the new instance.

We then tried using the A address of the load balancer for the Route 53 DNS, but that was not distributing the load either.

Are we doing this completely wrong? Do the Route 53 an ELB need to work in conjunction?

I really appreciate any help with this.

**NOTE at low traffic our health checks work fine and our instances are "In Service"

Answer 1

1. You need to have the route53 domain direct traffic to the ELB. If you have example.com and are trying to route that to the load balancer you need to associate the apex with the load balancer.

To do this, go to the route53 tab. Click your hosted zone and go to record sets. then create a new zone and click yes for alias You then need to associate the hosted zone with your ELB.

1. Now to get the traffic to fail over correctly you need to be running both instances behind the load balancer (preferably in multiple availability zones) and the ELB will take care of the failover.

To do this, go to the elb section of ec2. Click your load balancer and add instances to it.