A project team is launching a multi-tier web application. They need a mechanism to spread inbound TCP/UDP connections across several instances while keeping the original client IP address visible to the servers and introducing as little additional processing as possible. Which solution meets these requirements?
A transport-layer load balancer that forwards traffic based on IP address and port without modifying the packets
Round-robin DNS that alternates A or AAAA records to distribute clients
An inline application gateway that performs deep packet inspection and policy enforcement
An application-layer load balancer that rewrites headers to perform content-based routing
A network (Layer 4) load balancer makes its forwarding decision using only the destination and source IP addresses and ports. Because it simply passes the TCP or UDP packets through, it adds negligible latency and lets the backend servers see the true client source IP. Application-layer devices perform content-based routing or security inspection and therefore terminate and recreate connections, rewriting headers and adding processing overhead. DNS round-robin updates A or AAAA records to different IPs but has no health awareness or session persistence and cannot guarantee even distribution once results are cached. A deep-inspection gateway similarly terminates the session to analyze packet contents, altering packet metadata before forwarding.
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What is the transport layer, and how does it work in networking?
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How does a transport-layer approach preserve original identifying data during connections?
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Why is a content-based or higher-layer approach considered less efficient in this scenario?