Which Cloud Component Provides High Availability?
Short answer
D Load balancer
Question
Key Takeaways
The question evaluates knowledge of cloud resilience patterns, with the primary trap being the misattribution of security-focused services like WAFs or access brokers to availability functions.
High availability in cloud computing requires architectures that eliminate single points of failure through redundancy and traffic distribution. Community consensus confirms that a load balancer is the definitive cloud component for ensuring continuous application availability.
Common mistake: Test-takers often select WAF or Access Broker because these services also handle incoming requests, but they lack the built-in health monitoring and multi-instance routing required for true high availability.
Expert Analysis
Why the Answer Is Correct
A load balancer sits at the edge of a cloud deployment and intelligently distributes incoming client requests across multiple backend instances or virtual machines. By continuously performing health checks and rerouting traffic away from failed nodes, it prevents any single resource from becoming a bottleneck or point of failure. This active-passive or active-active distribution model is the foundational mechanism for achieving high availability (HA) and fault tolerance in modern cloud environments.
Why the Other Options Are Wrong
An access broker handles identity federation and single sign-on (SSO) decisions, focusing strictly on authentication and authorization rather than infrastructure resilience. Cloud HSMs provide hardware-backed cryptographic key storage and compliance, serving a purely security and data protection role. Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) inspect and filter HTTP/S traffic to block malicious requests, which enhances security posture but does not distribute workload or ensure service continuity during outages.
Community Comment Notes
Candidates universally validated option D, emphasizing that load balancers actively prevent server overload by spreading network traffic. One highly upvoted comment noted that this distribution guarantees availability by ensuring no single server bears excessive demand. Another highlighted the direct correlation between traffic distribution and maintaining uninterrupted application performance, reinforcing the official exam rationale.
Official Reference
- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/introduction.html
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/load-balancer/load-balancer-overview
- https://www.comptia.org/training-resources/security-sy0-701-objectives
These links open the official vendor documentation in a new tab.
Exam Strategy
When reviewing cloud services, always categorize them by their primary purpose: security, identity, compute, or availability. Practice mapping each managed service to its core architectural pattern to quickly eliminate security-focused distractors when questions target reliability and uptime.
Community Votes
100% of anonymous learners picked answer D. Votes are pick records left by other test-takers — they are not the verified answer.
Discussion 3 contributions
Compiled from public community threads and reader submissions, lightly edited for clarity. Handles and vote tallies are shown as recorded, and comments reflect the views of individual contributors.
From public community threads 3
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a4e15bd 👍 5D Load balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers or instances ensuring that no single server becomes overwhelmed and helps maintain the availability of applications and services.
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FrozenCarrot 👍 2 Answered DLoad balancer distribute traffic between servers, guarantee availability.
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qacollin 👍 2 Answered DD. GPT!
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