What should a solutions architect recommend to meet the clients’ needs?
A Network Load Balancer with an associated Elastic IP address.
An Application Load Balancer with an associated Elastic IP address
An A record in an Amazon Route 53 hosted zone pointing to an Elastic IP address
An EC2 instance with a public IP address running as a proxy in front of the load balancer
Explanations:
A Network Load Balancer (NLB) can be assigned an Elastic IP address, allowing clients to whitelist this static IP for access. NLBs are also capable of handling sudden and volatile traffic patterns while providing ultra-low latency.
An Application Load Balancer (ALB) cannot have an Elastic IP address associated with it. ALBs are designed for Layer 7 traffic management and work with DNS names rather than static IPs, which does not meet the clients’ needs for whitelisting IPs.
While an A record in Route 53 can point to an Elastic IP address, this solution does not provide the load balancing capability that is needed. Additionally, if the Elastic IP address is not associated with a load balancer, it won’t distribute traffic effectively among instances.
An EC2 instance with a public IP acting as a proxy would introduce a single point of failure and complicate the architecture. This setup is not scalable or efficient for load balancing and does not leverage the features of load balancers effectively.
I opine that the answer is:
A Network Load Balancer with an associated Elastic IP address.