Examkin

Question

Difficulty: HardApplication Load Balancing and Delivery

A municipal transit authority is designing the regional application delivery and load balancing architecture for its new passenger information system in the North Europe region. The system consists of two primary workloads deployed within a single virtual network:

1. A passenger-facing web portal that requires SSL/TLS termination, cookie-based session affinity, and URL path-based routing (routing `/schedules/*` and `/fares/*` to separate backend pools).
2. A real-time vehicle telemetry ingestion service that processes continuous location data sent over UDP port 5099.

The backend VMs for the telemetry service currently have Basic SKU public IP addresses assigned to their network interfaces.

You need to recommend a load balancing solution that meets all technical requirements while ensuring architectural compatibility.

Which load balancing solution should you recommend?

  1. Deploy Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 to load balance the web portal, and deploy Azure Standard Load Balancer to load balance the telemetry service after upgrading the telemetry VMs' public IP addresses to Standard SKU.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 to load balance the web portal, and deploy Azure Standard Load Balancer to load balance the telemetry service while retaining the Basic SKU public IP addresses on the telemetry VMs.
  3. C
    Deploy Azure Traffic Manager using performance-based routing to distribute both the passenger web portal traffic and the UDP telemetry traffic directly to the backend VMs.
  4. D
    Deploy a single Azure Standard Load Balancer to load balance both the passenger web portal and the UDP telemetry service by configuring custom inbound NAT rules for path-based routing.

Answer

Deploy Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 to load balance the web portal, and deploy Azure Standard Load Balancer to load balance the telemetry service after upgrading the telemetry VMs' public IP addresses to Standard SKU.
The correct solution uses Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 for the web portal because it natively supports Layer 7 capabilities including SSL/TLS termination, cookie-based affinity, and URL path-based routing. It uses Azure Standard Load Balancer for the telemetry service because the service uses the UDP protocol, which is not supported by Application Gateway. Upgrading the telemetry VMs' public IP addresses to Standard SKU is necessary because Azure does not permit VMs with Basic SKU public IP addresses to be members of a Standard Load Balancer's backend pool.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the routing requirements of the web portal.
These are Layer 7 application-layer routing capabilities, which require Azure Application Gateway (or Azure Front Door, but Front Door is global whereas this is regional).
Azure Load Balancer operates at Layer 4 and cannot inspect HTTP paths or handle cookie-based affinity.
2
Identify the routing requirements of the telemetry service.
This requires a Layer 4 load balancer since Azure Application Gateway only supports HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2, and WebSocket protocols.
Azure Standard Load Balancer is needed to route UDP traffic.
3
Evaluate backend compatibility and SKU constraints.
To attach these VMs to the Standard Load Balancer backend pool, their public IP addresses must be upgraded to Standard SKU.
You cannot mix Basic SKU public IP addresses with Standard SKU load balancers.

Key Concept

Combining Azure Application Gateway for Layer 7 web traffic and Azure Standard Load Balancer for Layer 4 UDP traffic, while resolving SKU mismatch limitations between Basic SKU public IPs and Standard SKU load balancers.
Rate this question

Topics

Application Load Balancing and Delivery

More questions from this topic