Exam AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C03 topic 1 question 987 discussion

This is A and B. TCP best option is NLB. I know tons of you want to use chat GPT and it's going to tell you application load balancer, then ask chatgpt if an application load balancer really is the best option for TCP and it will be like "aw dang dawg, its not, you're right". Then it will switch to A and B. Because chatgpt doesn't know everything. It's a great tool but you still need to research because it doesn't have all the answers.

I initially selected BC because the question mentions "application" which I immediately assumed Layer 7 communication. However, the question also mentions "End users use TCP to communicate with the application." and looking at the AWS's ELB's comparison, NLB seems like a right fit. Regardless, the question is too vague to fully understand the correct requirements. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/features/#compare

TCP = NLB highly available and automatically scale = Auto scaling group

Even for basic TCP, ALBs are still operating at Layer 7 to some extent. They have to do more processing per connection than an NLB, which operates at Layer 4. This translates to higher resource consumption on the ALB side, even for simple TCP forwarding. Also, both ALBs and NLBs have similar pricing structures based on 1. Hourly usage: You pay for the time the load balancer is running. This is generally comparable between the two. 2. Load Balancer Capacity Units (LCUs) For TCP traffic, NLBs are significantly more efficient in terms of LCU consumption, especially regarding new connections and bytes processed. Even with low connection rates, the overhead of the ALB's Layer 7 processing will usually result in higher LCU consumption and therefore higher costs.

ALB for TCP

VOTE BC

ALB is much cheaper than the NLB. Thus, the best way to use NLB is when your application requires TCP and UDP connection. In this scenario, the users only communicate using TCP, which the ALB supports including variety of protocols such as, HTTP, HTTPS & SSL. Additionally, ALB's service uptime is up to 99.995%, which falls to the requirement of this question that application must be highly available.

TCP - NLB