CompTIA Cloud+ (CV0-004)Cloud ArchitectureMedium
An e-commerce company is experiencing unpredictable traffic spikes, particularly during seasonal sales events. To ensure continuous availability and optimal performance, they decide to distribute incoming web traffic across multiple identical web servers located in different availability zones. Which networking component is essential for achieving this goal?
- AVirtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- BNetwork Access Control List (NACL)
- CLoad Balancer
- DDistributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Load Balancer
A load balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers, ensuring that no single server becomes a bottleneck and improving application availability and responsiveness, especially during traffic spikes.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. VPCs provide an isolated virtual network, but they don't inherently distribute traffic across multiple instances within that network.
- B. NACLs are used for stateless packet filtering at the subnet level, not for distributing traffic to servers.
- D. DDoS protection mitigates malicious traffic but does not distribute legitimate application traffic across backend servers for performance and availability.
Load Balancer
A device or service that distributes network traffic efficiently across multiple servers. Load balancing ensures high availability and reliability by sending requests only to servers that are online and capable of handling the traffic.
- Distributes incoming traffic across multiple backend servers
- Enhances availability and fault tolerance
- Improves performance and scalability
- Can perform health checks on backend instances
Memory trick: Load Balancer makes traffic flow, VPC makes network grow.