SY0-701 Question 232
Single answerHigh availability: Load balancing vs. clusteringAn e-commerce company is redesigning its public web environment after a recent outage. The security team requires a solution that keeps the website available if a single web server fails and also improves performance during peak shopping periods by distributing client requests across multiple servers. Which solution BEST meets these requirements?
- A
Deploy a load balancer in front of multiple web servers
- B
Configure the web servers in a failover cluster with a single active node
- C
Implement full-disk encryption on each web server
- D
Place the web application in a sandbox on one hardened server
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is to deploy a load balancer in front of multiple web servers. In Security+ terms, load balancing and clustering are both associated with high availability, but they solve different operational problems. Load balancing is used to distribute workloads across systems, improving scalability and helping maintain availability if a node fails. Clustering, especially failover clustering, is more focused on redundancy and service continuity if a system or service becomes unavailable. In this scenario, the company explicitly needs both continued operation after a single server failure and better performance under heavy traffic, which makes load balancing the best fit. This aligns with common high-availability design practices described by major vendors and best-practice guidance, where load balancers perform health checks and remove failed nodes from rotation while continuing to serve requests through healthy servers.
- A. Correct.
Correct. A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple backend servers, which improves performance and supports high availability if one server becomes unavailable. This matches the requirement to both spread user requests during peak demand and maintain service when a single web server fails. In practice, load balancers often use health checks to stop sending traffic to failed nodes.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A failover cluster is designed primarily for availability by shifting services to another node when one fails, but a single active-node cluster does not normally distribute client traffic across multiple servers for performance. This option addresses redundancy better than scalability, so it does not best meet both stated requirements.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Full-disk encryption protects data at rest, which is an important security control, but it does not provide traffic distribution or service continuity during a server failure. Someone might choose this because it is security-related, but it does not solve the availability and performance problem described.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Sandboxing can help isolate applications and reduce the impact of compromise, but running the application on one server creates a single point of failure. It also does nothing to distribute traffic across multiple systems during periods of heavy use.