Which feature allows you to balance incoming application traffic across multiple targets?

The feature that allows you to balance incoming application traffic across multiple targets is load balancing. Load balancing is a critical component in cloud architecture as it helps to distribute incoming traffic evenly across several resources, such as EC2 instances, containers, or other services. This distribution ensures that no single target is overwhelmed with requests, which can help maintain application performance and availability.

By utilizing a load balancer, you can effectively manage high volumes of incoming traffic, automatically route user requests, and provide fault tolerance. If one target becomes unavailable, the load balancer can redirect traffic to healthily functioning targets, thereby enhancing the reliability of your applications. Furthermore, load balancers can integrate with auto scaling features to dynamically adjust the number of targets based on traffic demand, ensuring optimal performance with resource efficiency.

In contrast to load balancing, auto scaling primarily focuses on automatically adjusting the capacity of your resources, not directly managing traffic distribution. Multi-AZ deployment provides increased availability and fault tolerance by distributing resources across different availability zones, but it does not inherently distribute traffic. CloudWatch monitoring is a service that tracks and reports metrics about your AWS resources and applications, providing insights into performance but not controlling traffic flow.