What is Alibaba Cloud's Server Load Balancer (SLB) primarily used for?

Alibaba Cloud's Server Load Balancer (SLB) is primarily used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple instances. This service plays a crucial role in ensuring high availability and reliability for applications by balancing the load of incoming requests across a set of backend servers. By doing this, SLB helps optimize resource utilization, enhance application performance, and minimize the risk of any single server becoming a bottleneck or point of failure.

In scenarios where applications experience varying traffic levels, SLB can intelligently route requests to the appropriate resources, ensuring that no single instance is overwhelmed. This capability ensures that users receive consistent responses and that resources are allocated effectively, which is vital for maintaining a seamless user experience, especially during peak times.

The other options describe functionalities that are not the primary purpose of SLB. Hosting virtual machines relates more to compute services, while storing large datasets pertains to storage solutions. Securing customer data during transfer involves security technologies and protocols.