A company has a new application that runs on three Amazon EC2 instances. The EC2 instances are spread across three Availability Zones in a single AWS Region. The application is accessible on TCP…

Question

Options

• ACreate an Application Load Balancer with a listener configured to use port 1028. Create a target
• BCreate a Network Load Balancer with a listener configured to use port 1028. Create a target
• CCreate a Gateway Load Balancer with a listener configured to use port 1028. Create a target
• DLaunch an EC2 instance with HAProxy configured that forwards requests to the three IP

• A
  5% (1)
• B
  79% (15)
• C
  11% (2)
• D
  5% (1)

Explanation

Option B is correct because a Network Load Balancer (NLB) operates at Layer 4 and supports any TCP or UDP port - including non-standard ports like 1028 - making it the appropriate managed AWS solution here with near-zero operational overhead.

Option A is wrong because an Application Load Balancer (ALB) operates at Layer 7 and only supports HTTP/HTTPS traffic on ports 80 and 443; it cannot forward arbitrary TCP ports like 1028.

Option C is wrong because a Gateway Load Balancer is designed to route traffic through third-party virtual appliances (firewalls, IDS/IPS) for inspection - it is not a general-purpose application load balancer.

Option D is wrong because self-managing HAProxy on an EC2 instance introduces significant operational overhead: you must handle patching, scaling, availability, and configuration yourself.

Memory tip: Think "NLB = Network = Non-HTTP ports." Whenever you see a non-HTTP/S port (anything other than 80/443) and need a managed AWS load balancer, NLB is your answer. ALB = HTTP only, NLB = any TCP/UDP, GWLB = security appliances.

No community discussion yet for this question.