So I'm wondering if this is a good idea. I have a Amazon AWS VPC setup with a public and private subnets. So I all ready get the Internet Gateway and NAT. I was going to setup all my web servers (Apache2 isntances) and DB servers in the private subnet and use a Load Balancer/Reverse Proxy to pick up requests and send them into the private subnets cluster of servers. My question then, is Amazons ELB's a good use for these, or is it better to setup my own custom instance to handle the public requests and run them through the NAT using nginx or pound?

I like the second option just for the sake of having a instance I can log into and check. As well as taking advantage of caching and fail2ban ddos prevention, as well as possibly using fail safes to redirect traffic. But I have no experience with their ELB's, so I thought I'd ask your opinions.

Also, if you guys have an opinion on this as well, would using the second option allow me to only have 1 public IP address and be able to route SSH connections through port numbers to respective instances?

Thanks in advance!