CompTIA Cloud+ Practice Test

What device provides performance enhancements and encryption termination services for web servers?

1. Firewall

2. Load Balancer

3. Router

4. Proxy Server

The correct answer is: Load Balancer

A load balancer plays a vital role in managing and optimizing the performance of web servers. It does this by distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers, ensuring that no single server is overwhelmed with requests. This dispatching is essential for maintaining high availability and responsiveness for users. In the context of encryption termination, a load balancer can provide SSL offloading, which means it can handle the encryption and decryption of SSL/TLS traffic before it reaches the web servers. This process alleviates the computational overhead from the web servers, allowing them to focus more on processing requests rather than handling encryption tasks. As a result, the load balancer enhances overall performance and can improve response times for users. While other devices like firewalls, routers, and proxy servers have their own specific functions, they don’t serve the dual purpose of load balancing web traffic and performing encryption termination as effectively as a load balancer does. Firewalls primarily focus on security and filtering traffic, routers direct data between different networks, and proxy servers act as intermediaries for requests, which may include caching and filtering but do not inherently provide load balancing or SSL termination capabilities. Thus, the load balancer uniquely combines these critical functions for web server performance and security in a cloud environment.