What is the purpose of a load balancer?

• A. To encrypt data at rest.
• B. To monitor user activity.
• C. To distribute traffic across multiple servers to improve performance and availability.
• D. To manage firewall rules.

Answer: (C)

A load balancer works by spreading client requests across several servers so no single server bears all the load. This distribution helps improve performance because multiple servers can handle more requests in parallel, reducing response times. It also boosts availability because if one server fails, the load balancer can route traffic to healthy servers, providing fault tolerance and continuous service.

In practice, it may use methods like round-robin or least connections and perform health checks to keep routing only to working servers. Some load balancers can also terminate TLS to offload encryption work, further improving efficiency.

Other functions mentioned—encrypting data at rest, monitoring user activity, or managing firewall rules—are handled by different components (storage security, analytics/monitoring tools, and firewalls respectively), not by a load balancer.