Elastic Load Balancing helps distribute incoming network traffic across multiple targets, such as virtual servers, containers, and IP addresses in different Availability Zones. This process increases the fault tolerance of an application by responding to variations in traffic, ensuring that no single server bears too much load, all without the need to modify the application's code. 'Direct Connect' provides a dedicated network link between on-premises environments and its servers, which may improve network performance but not necessarily the fault tolerance of the application itself. 'Lambda' is a compute service that runs code in response to events, and typically requires changing the application architecture to a serverless model. 'Simple Storage Service' is used for object storage and would not address traffic distribution or fault tolerance for an active web application.