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Difficulty: MediumApplication Load Balancing and Delivery

An organization is designing the load balancing architecture for a multi-tier web application in the East US region. The solution must meet the following requirements:
- Web Tier: Requires global distribution, SSL/TLS termination, and HTTP/S URL-path-based routing to support different backend services.
- Database Tier: Requires regional load balancing of TCP port 14331433 traffic across database Virtual Machines (VMs) distributed across three availability zones. The VMs currently utilize Basic SKU Public IP addresses for legacy remote access.

You are designing the database tier load balancing solution. Which configuration should you recommend to meet the database tier requirements while preventing validation errors?

  1. Upgrade the VM Public IP addresses to Standard SKU and deploy an Azure Standard Load Balancer.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy an Azure Standard Load Balancer and associate the database VMs directly without modifying their Basic SKU Public IP configurations.
  3. C
    Deploy an Azure Basic Load Balancer and configure its frontend IP address to be zone-redundant to match the VM IP SKU.
  4. D
    Deploy Azure Traffic Manager to load balance the TCP port 14331433 traffic directly to the VMs' Basic SKU Public IPs.

Answer

Upgrade the VM Public IP addresses to Standard SKU and deploy an Azure Standard Load Balancer.
Upgrading the VM Public IP addresses to Standard SKU and deploying an Azure Standard Load Balancer is correct because the Standard Load Balancer is required to achieve zone-redundancy and support the distribution of TCP traffic across three availability zones. However, Azure enforces SKU consistency; standard-tier resources cannot be mixed with basic-tier resources in the backend configuration. Therefore, the VMs' existing Basic SKU Public IP addresses must be upgraded to Standard SKU to match the Standard Load Balancer, avoiding validation failures during deployment.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the protocol and high-availability requirements of the database tier.
The database tier requires TCP port 14331433 load balancing (Layer 4) with zone-redundancy.
This narrows down the potential load balancing services to those supporting regional Layer 4 load balancing and availability zones.
2
Evaluate Azure load balancer SKU capabilities for zone-redundancy.
Azure Standard Load Balancer supports zone-redundant frontends, whereas Azure Basic Load Balancer does not.
This establishes that a Standard Load Balancer must be used to meet the high availability requirements.
3
Resolve the SKU mismatch between the selected load balancer and the database VM configurations.
Identify that the database VMs have Basic SKU Public IPs, which are incompatible with a Standard Load Balancer's backend pool. The VM Public IPs must be upgraded to Standard SKU.
Azure requires SKU consistency within the load balancing path to prevent validation errors.

Key Concept

Azure Load Balancer SKU alignment and availability zone support.
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Topics

Application Load Balancing and Delivery

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