Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Practice Exam

Which networking product evenly distributes service requests across multiple instances in different Availability Zones?

1. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

2. Application Gateway

3. Load Balancer

4. Web Application Firewall (WAF)

The correct answer is: Application Gateway

The Load Balancer is the correct answer because it is specifically designed to distribute incoming network traffic evenly across multiple server instances, ensuring no single server becomes overwhelmed with too many requests. This functionality is essential for maintaining high availability and reliability in cloud services, as it helps optimize resource use and enhances application responsiveness. Load Balancers can also be set up across different Availability Zones, which provides added redundancy and fault tolerance. If one instance or zone fails, the Load Balancer can reroute traffic to other healthy instances, maintaining the service's availability. While the Application Gateway does offer some load balancing features along with application routing and web traffic management, it is primarily used for web applications and may not provide the same level of network-level distribution across instances as a Load Balancer does. The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is focused on delivering web content and improving performance by caching static resources closer to end users, rather than balancing requests among multiple servers. The Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides protection against common web threats and may integrate with other solutions, but its primary function is security rather than traffic distribution. Understanding the distinctions between these products is vital for effectively implementing Azure networking solutions tailored to your application needs.