AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty Practice Exam

Which AWS service is being utilized to distribute traffic to application servers?

1. AWS CloudFront

2. AWS Route 53

3. Elastic Load Balancer

4. AWS Direct Connect

The correct answer is: Elastic Load Balancer

The Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is the service used to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. This enhances the availability and fault tolerance of your application by ensuring that no single server is overwhelmed with too many requests, which can lead to degraded performance or downtime. With ELB, you can automatically distribute traffic in a balanced manner, which significantly helps in scaling applications and improving user experience. It also supports features like health checks, allowing it to route traffic only to healthy instances, further increasing reliability. The other services play different roles. For instance, AWS CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that serves static and dynamic web content from edge locations, which focuses more on caching and distribution of web content rather than load balancing between application servers. AWS Route 53 is a scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service that provides DNS routing and health checking but does not directly distribute traffic to application servers itself. AWS Direct Connect is a network service that provides a dedicated connection from your on-premises network to AWS, but it does not handle traffic distribution across servers. Therefore, Elastic Load Balancer directly addresses the need for effective traffic distribution among application servers, enhancing performance and