Challenge your understanding of Elastic Load Balancer fundamentals with this quiz designed to test key concepts such as traffic distribution, health checks, security features, and basic configuration. Enhance your knowledge of load balancing principles and essential functionalities for scalable systems.
What is the main purpose of using an elastic load balancer in a network environment?
Explanation: The primary role of an elastic load balancer is to distribute incoming network traffic across several backend servers, ensuring optimal resource use and avoiding server overload. Backing up data, encrypting traffic, and storing user credentials are important tasks, but they are not the main functions of a load balancer. Instead, these tasks are handled by other components in the infrastructure.
When an elastic load balancer receives incoming requests, which method can it use to decide which server to forward the request to?
Explanation: A common routing method for load balancers is Round Robin, where each server receives traffic in a rotating order to maintain balanced usage. Single Point Forwarding would send all traffic to one server, defeating the purpose of load balancing. Direct Caching and Repeated Polling are unrelated to typical load balancing methods, as they do not involve distributing requests among servers.
Why does an elastic load balancer perform health checks on backend servers?
Explanation: Health checks are performed to ensure that only servers capable of handling requests receive traffic, avoiding server downtime or unresponsive applications. Measuring response time is sometimes part of a health check, but not its main purpose. Monitoring temperature and tracking login attempts are unrelated to load balancing health checks.
How does an elastic load balancer contribute to the scalability of an application during high traffic periods?
Explanation: An elastic load balancer helps applications handle growing or fluctuating demand by automatically distributing traffic to all available servers. Restricting access could block users, which is not the goal. Compressing data is a different optimization, while closing idle connections may conserve resources but doesn't scale the application.
Which feature allows an elastic load balancer to direct a client’s subsequent requests to the same server as their initial request?
Explanation: Sticky Sessions enable the load balancer to route a client’s future requests to the same server for session consistency. Random Assignment does not guarantee this behavior. Token Encryption and Packet Inspection address security and monitoring, not client-server session persistence.
How does an elastic load balancer improve the security of incoming connections?
Explanation: Elastic load balancers can handle the decryption of secure connections, making it easier to manage certificates and offloading this process from backend servers. Storing passwords and updating firewalls are security measures but not tasks handled by the load balancer. Erasing server logs may compromise security rather than improve it.
Which protocol is commonly supported by elastic load balancers to handle web traffic?
Explanation: Elastic load balancers frequently support the HTTP protocol, which is the foundation of web traffic. FTP is mainly used for file transfers, SMTP for email sending, and SNMP for network monitoring—these are not primary protocols for web load balancers.
What happens when a backend server registered with an elastic load balancer becomes unhealthy?
Explanation: When a backend server fails health checks, the load balancer stops sending new requests to it to protect the user experience. Continuing to receive traffic could lead to failures, duplicating the server is a separate scaling action, and the load balancer does not shut down due to an unhealthy backend.
Which configuration step is essential when setting up an elastic load balancer for a web application?
Explanation: It's necessary to register server instances with the load balancer so it knows where to route traffic. Installing database clients, enabling notifications, and updating browsers are unrelated to configuring a load balancer for web traffic.
What is one benefit of using an elastic load balancer with automatic scaling settings enabled?
Explanation: Automatic scaling lets the system add or remove servers as traffic changes, ensuring consistent performance and availability. Fixing the server count limits responsiveness, while disabling traffic distribution removes the core utility of load balancing. Packet size reduction is unrelated to load balancer scaling.