A large enterprise is migrating its monolithic application to a microservices architecture, exposing numerous APIs to both internal and external consumers. The team needs to implement centralized authentication, rate limiting, and request transformation for these APIs, while also ensuring high availability and scalable distribution of traffic to the underlying microservice instances. Which of the following statements most accurately describes the optimal deployment and interaction of a Load Balancer and an API Gateway to meet these requirements?

A Load Balancer should be deployed in front of the API Gateway to distribute incoming traffic to multiple instances of the API Gateway, which will then handle API-specific policies and route requests to backend microservices.

A single API Gateway should be deployed in front of the Load Balancer to handle all traffic distribution and API management tasks, as the API Gateway encompasses all Load Balancer functionalities.

The API Gateway and Load Balancer are mutually exclusive; one must be chosen over the other based on whether traffic distribution or API management is the primary concern.

Both a Load Balancer and an API Gateway are unnecessary; modern microservice frameworks can directly handle authentication, rate limiting, and traffic distribution.

A company is experiencing intermittent latency spikes and service unavailability for some of its publicly exposed APIs. After initial investigation, it's determined that several backend microservices are sporadically overloaded, and there's no consistent mechanism to filter malicious or excessively frequent requests. The existing infrastructure uses a Layer 4 Load Balancer. To address these issues effectively, which of the following is the most appropriate next architectural step?

Implement an API Gateway in front of the existing Layer 4 Load Balancer to handle rate limiting, request validation, and intelligent routing based on API context.

Upgrade the existing Layer 4 Load Balancer to a Layer 7 Load Balancer to enable URL-based routing and basic request filtering.

Add more instances of the backend microservices and rely solely on the Layer 4 Load Balancer for distribution.

Replace the Layer 4 Load Balancer entirely with an API Gateway to consolidate all traffic management and API governance.

Consider a scenario where an application's internal microservices need to communicate with each other, and these communications involve sensitive data requiring mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication. Additionally, the internal network architecture requires efficient traffic distribution among instances of the same microservice for resilience. Which component is primarily responsible for ensuring mTLS authentication for internal service-to-service communication, and which is responsible for distributing traffic to individual instances?

Service Mesh for mTLS and Load Balancer for traffic distribution.

API Gateway for mTLS and Load Balancer for traffic distribution.

Load Balancer for mTLS and API Gateway for traffic distribution.

Both API Gateway and Load Balancer handle mTLS and traffic distribution concurrently.

A developer is designing a system where multiple versions of the same API (e.g., '/v1/users' and '/v2/users') need to be exposed simultaneously, with a gradual rollout strategy for the 'v2' API. During the rollout, 10% of the traffic should be routed to 'v2', and 90% to 'v1'. This requires inspection of the request path and potentially HTTP headers for intelligent routing decisions. Which component is best suited to manage this versioned API routing and traffic splitting?

An API Gateway, with route definitions based on URL paths and header matching.

A Layer 4 Load Balancer, configured with IP-based routing rules.

A DNS-based Load Balancer, using weighted round-robin policies.

A network firewall, configured with port-based traffic redirection.

Which of the following scenarios would definitively require an API Gateway in addition to a Load Balancer, rather than just a more advanced Load Balancer (e.g., Layer 7)?

Implementing fine-grained access control based on JWT tokens, applying rate limits per API key, and transforming request/response payloads.

Distributing TCP traffic across multiple backend servers based on server health checks.

Performing URL path-based routing to different microservices (e.g., '/users' to User Service, '/products' to Product Service).

Managing sticky sessions for HTTP requests to ensure a user's requests always go to the same backend server.

An architect is evaluating solutions for an edge infrastructure that needs to protect backend services from common web attacks (e.g., SQL injection, XSS), enforce strict API security policies (like OAuth2 validation), and provide a unified entry point for external consumers. The solution must also balance incoming traffic efficiently across multiple identical backend services. What is the most robust and secure architectural combination for this requirement?

Deploy a Load Balancer in front of an API Gateway, with the API Gateway providing WAF-like features and API security.

Deploy a Layer 7 Load Balancer with Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities.

Deploy an API Gateway to handle all functionalities, as it is a superset of a Load Balancer.

Deploy an API Gateway behind a Web Application Firewall (WAF), which is then fronted by a Load Balancer.

A financial institution requires extremely low-latency routing for high-frequency trading applications. These applications use custom binary protocols over TCP, and traffic distribution needs to be based on server capacity and current load, with minimal processing overhead at the edge. Additionally, no API-specific authentication or transformation is required at the entry point. Which component is most appropriate for this specific edge traffic management?

A Layer 4 Load Balancer for high-performance TCP traffic distribution.

An API Gateway due to its advanced routing capabilities.

A Layer 7 Load Balancer for intelligent application-level routing.

A Service Mesh for transparent traffic management.

Which of the following describes a key distinction in how a Layer 7 Load Balancer and an API Gateway typically handle backend service health checks, particularly in a microservices environment?

An API Gateway is more likely to incorporate 'circuit breaker' patterns and proactive checks on specific API endpoint responsiveness and error rates, while a Layer 7 Load Balancer primarily focuses on basic service process availability.

Both Layer 7 Load Balancers and API Gateways perform simple ping checks at the network layer to determine service availability.

A Layer 7 Load Balancer typically performs deeper, application-protocol-aware health checks (e.g., HTTP GET to a '/health' endpoint), whereas an API Gateway does not typically perform health checks, relying solely on the Load Balancer.

The API Gateway is solely responsible for health checks, and a Layer 7 Load Balancer only distributes traffic to predefined IP addresses without health assessment.

A legacy system exposes a SOAP API, but new client applications are being developed that require a RESTful JSON interface. The company wants to expose a unified REST API for new clients while still supporting existing SOAP clients. This requires protocol translation and data format transformation. Which component is best suited to bridge this gap, and how would it typically interact with other infrastructure components?

An API Gateway should be used to provide the RESTful interface, performing the protocol and data transformation, potentially behind a Load Balancer for its own scaling.

A Layer 7 Load Balancer can perform this transformation and should be placed directly in front of the legacy SOAP service.

A custom middleware proxy should be developed, as neither a Load Balancer nor an API Gateway offers such capabilities.

The legacy SOAP service must be rewritten to expose a RESTful interface, as no external component can reliably perform such complex transformations.

In a highly distributed system using event-driven microservices, certain events need to trigger external API calls, but these calls must be aggregated, deduplicated, and rate-limited before reaching the third-party API provider. The external API provider also requires specific HTTP headers for authentication and API key management. Which component is primarily responsible for handling this complex outgoing traffic management and policy enforcement?

An API Gateway, acting as an 'egress gateway' to manage outgoing external API calls.

A dedicated Load Balancer, configured with advanced outbound routing rules.

Each microservice should implement its own logic for aggregation, deduplication, and rate limiting for external calls.

A Message Broker, which will handle all external API call logic as part of its event processing.

Load Balancer vs. API Gateway

Load Balancer vs. API Gateway - Test Paper