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GCDL Practice Question: A company hosts a web application that receives…

This GCDL practice question tests your understanding of a company hosts a web application that receives…. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.

A company hosts a web application that receives requests from users globally. To handle failures, they run three identical copies of their application behind a load balancer. When one copy fails, the load balancer automatically stops sending traffic to it. What load balancing feature enables this?

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Full question →

A company hosts a web application that receives requests from users globally. To handle failures, they run three identical copies of their application behind a load balancer. When one copy fails, the load balancer automatically stops sending traffic to it. What load balancing feature enables this?

Answer choices

Why each option matters

Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.

A

Distractor review

Round-robin distribution — traffic cycles evenly across all instances regardless of health.

Round-robin distributes traffic evenly but doesn't account for instance health. Without health checks, round-robin continues sending requests to failed instances.

B

Best answer

Health checks — the load balancer probes backend instances and removes unhealthy ones from the serving pool.

Health checks detect failed backends by sending periodic probe requests. Unhealthy backends are removed from rotation; remaining healthy instances absorb the traffic. This is automatic fault detection.

C

Distractor review

Session affinity — routing the same user to the same backend instance.

Session affinity (sticky sessions) routes a user consistently to the same backend for stateful applications. It doesn't automatically remove failed backends from rotation.

D

Distractor review

SSL termination — decrypting HTTPS traffic before forwarding to backends.

SSL termination decrypts encrypted traffic at the load balancer, not a health or availability feature. It handles encryption, not fault detection.

Common exam trap

Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic

NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.

Technical deep dive

How to think about this question

NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.

KKey Concepts to Remember

  • Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
  • PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
  • Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
  • NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.

TExam Day Tips

  • Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
  • Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
  • Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.

Key takeaway

NAT direction and interface roles matter as much as the IP address mapping. Inside/outside designation controls which traffic is translated.

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FAQ

Questions learners often ask

What does this GCDL question test?

Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Health checks — the load balancer probes backend instances and removes unhealthy ones from the serving pool. — Health checks are the mechanism by which load balancers verify that backend instances are operational. The load balancer regularly sends probe requests to each backend. If a backend fails health checks (doesn't respond, returns an error), the load balancer marks it as unhealthy and stops routing traffic to it. Traffic is redistributed to the remaining healthy backends. This is the core mechanism enabling automatic fault tolerance in load-balanced architectures.

What should I do if I get this GCDL question wrong?

Review the four NAT address types (inside local, inside global, outside local, outside global), PAT port overload, and static vs dynamic NAT use cases. Then practise related GCDL NAT questions on configuration and troubleshooting.

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