Which AWS service can help enhance application reliability by managing requests during periods of high demand?

The Elastic Load Balancer is designed specifically to enhance application reliability by distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances. This load balancing capability helps ensure that no single instance is overwhelmed with too many requests, which can lead to performance degradation or system outages. By managing the traffic effectively, the Elastic Load Balancer allows applications to scale automatically in response to high demand, ensuring that they remain responsive and available to users.

This service also provides health checks to monitor the status of targets, routing traffic only to instances that are functioning properly. This proactive management of requests is crucial during periods of high traffic, as it helps maintain a steady and reliable user experience regardless of fluctuations in demand. Elastic Load Balancing fosters not only improved performance but also resilience, making it a key component in building scalable and highly available applications in the AWS ecosystem.