[manigandham]

Nginx running on a tiny instance can load balance 100k connections at thousands of requests per second. The network bandwidth for the instance will probably be saturated way before the CPU/RAM becomes a problem.

ELB (and most other managed service load balancers) are overpriced and not great at what they do. The advantage with them is easier setup and lack of maintenance.

If you're running a service with hundreds of millions or billions of requests, it's just far more effective in every way to use some small load balancing instances instead. Their Route53 service makes the DNS part easy enough with health checks.

[matt_wulfeck]

Why do you say they're overpriced? I would say for most apps their downright cheap. Especially since you spend so little time tinkering/monitoring/worrying about them. Most people just want to work on their app not manage Nginx configs.

[manigandham]

There is absolutely a tradeoff (as with everything in life) but in the context of this thread talking about scale with 100s of millions of requests, gigabytes of bandwidth and large spikes - it's far better to just host your own load balancers.

Most people (and apps) likely won't hit this scale so ELB is just fine. If you do though, ELB is just pricey and not really that great.