What device distributes client requests among multiple resources to provide fault tolerance and improve throughput?

What device distributes client requests among multiple resources to provide fault tolerance and improve throughput?

• A. Caching engines
• B. Load balancer
• C. IDS
• D. NGFW

Answer: (B)

Distributing client requests across multiple resources to improve fault tolerance and throughput is the job of a load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a pool of servers or services and routes incoming traffic according to a chosen algorithm (such as round-robin or least connections). This spreading of workload prevents any single resource from becoming a bottleneck and keeps the system available if one resource fails, because other resources can take over the load. Health checks continuously monitor the resources and automatically redirect traffic away from any that aren’t healthy. Load balancing also supports scalability, sometimes offering features like SSL termination and session persistence to optimize performance and reliability as demand changes. Caching engines store recently accessed data to speed up responses and reduce the load on back-end systems, but they do not manage the distribution of requests across multiple resources or provide fault tolerance for the resources themselves. An IDS (intrusion detection system) monitors and analyzes traffic for malicious activity, not load distribution. A next-generation firewall focuses on security controls such as threat prevention and application awareness, rather than distributing client requests across servers.

Distributing client requests across multiple resources to improve fault tolerance and throughput is the job of a load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a pool of servers or services and routes incoming traffic according to a chosen algorithm (such as round-robin or least connections). This spreading of workload prevents any single resource from becoming a bottleneck and keeps the system available if one resource fails, because other resources can take over the load. Health checks continuously monitor the resources and automatically redirect traffic away from any that aren’t healthy. Load balancing also supports scalability, sometimes offering features like SSL termination and session persistence to optimize performance and reliability as demand changes.

Caching engines store recently accessed data to speed up responses and reduce the load on back-end systems, but they do not manage the distribution of requests across multiple resources or provide fault tolerance for the resources themselves. An IDS (intrusion detection system) monitors and analyzes traffic for malicious activity, not load distribution. A next-generation firewall focuses on security controls such as threat prevention and application awareness, rather than distributing client requests across servers.