On ELB yes.

ELB is a substantial cost itself, though.

And not very good, together with the auto scaling groups, it performs the record act of not being able to do an instance refresh without downtime. We’ve put countless hours into that, seems like a simple problem, forums say it’s not solved.

This is not true.

You have to define health checks on your instances that reflect the availability of all services they host.

And you have to allow there to be more instances than your target number in each autoscaling group.

With a single instance? Could also do blue green instead.

Could you point to relevant thread please?

Cloudfront as well.