How does cross-zone load balancing affect traffic distribution?
hard📝 Best Practice Q15 of 15
AWS - Elastic Load Balancing
You have an Application Load Balancer spanning three Availability Zones with cross-zone load balancing enabled. One zone has only one healthy target, while the others have three each. How does cross-zone load balancing affect traffic distribution?
ATraffic is evenly distributed across all targets regardless of zone count.
BTraffic is evenly distributed across zones, so the zone with one target gets one-third of traffic.
CTraffic is sent only to zones with the most targets.
DTraffic is distributed randomly without considering zones or targets.
With cross-zone load balancing enabled, each load balancer node distributes traffic evenly across all healthy registered targets, regardless of their Availability Zone.
Step 2: Apply to given scenario
Total healthy targets: 1 + 3 + 3 = 7. Each target receives approximately equal traffic (1/7), so the zone with one target gets about 1/7 of total traffic.
Final Answer:
Traffic is evenly distributed across all targets regardless of zone count. -> Option A
Quick Check:
Cross-zone load balancing = even across all targets [OK]
Quick Trick:Cross-zone balances evenly across all targets, ignoring zone boundaries [OK]
Common Mistakes:
Confusing with default zone-isolated balancing (even per zone)
Thinking traffic prefers zones with more targets
Believing distribution ignores target count
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