A technician is configuring a new web application to be highly available. The technician has configured multiple web servers in different availability zones at a public cloud provider. The…

A network firewall primarily filters network traffic based on security rules (e.g., ports, protocols, IP addresses) and does not manage session persistence or direct users to specific application servers.

An intrusion prevention system (IPS) monitors network traffic for malicious activity and takes action to block threats, but it does not perform traffic distribution or manage session affinity for web applications.

A global load balancer is designed to distribute incoming user traffic across multiple web servers, even those deployed in different availability zones, while providing high availability. Importantly, it can be configured with session persistence (also known as sticky sessions) to ensure that a user's subsequent requests during an active session are consistently directed to the same backend server, which is crucial for applications that maintain state on the server side.

A virtual private network (VPN) establishes a secure, encrypted tunnel over a public network, primarily for secure remote access or site-to-site connectivity, and does not inherently provide application-level session persistence or direct users to specific web servers within a highly available pool.