Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a fantastic feature recently introduced by AWS that enables you to easily distribute incoming traffic amongst multiple EC2 instances. However initial set-up and configuration of ELB can be a bit daunting and troublesome when you are first exposed to it. There are a lot of common issues and problems that one comes across when debugging an ELB set-up that may not be working or one that has suddenly stopped working. These common issues are detailed and explained in an excellent post by Shlomo Swidler. He also talks about and demonstrates a debugging approach that uses a simple script/tool to run a sanity check against the load balancers to detect some of these common problems. This is a great idea and will let you catch most of the commonly encountered issues with ELBs. We have adapted and integrated the approach suggested by Shlomo into Ylastic, and now have a super simple way to run sanity checks against your ELBs. Here is a new screencast that shows off this feature.

Ylastic now gives you a simple to use GUI that makes it very easy to create and configure your load balancer, along with an easy to use sanity check test to help debug common issues with ELBs!