Get Your CertSAA-C03PlayCompete
‹ All SAA-C03 questions

SAA-C03 Practice Question 66: NLB Static IP TCP

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 7 · question 6 of 10

Network Performancemedium

A manufacturer is moving its telemetry ingestion service into a VPC. Several hundred thousand already-deployed field devices connect to it over plain TCP on port 9443, wrap their own TLS inside that connection, and have the destination IP addresses burned into firmware that cannot be updated to use DNS. The ingest application must also see each device's real source IP address for geographic auditing, and the service peaks at millions of connections.

Which load balancing option should the architect choose?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • A. A Network Load Balancer with an Elastic IP address associated with each Availability Zone's subnet

A Network Load Balancer operates at layer 4 and can handle millions of requests per second, which covers the connection volume and the plain-TCP, application-managed-TLS protocol. It creates a network interface per enabled Availability Zone, and for an internet-facing load balancer you can associate one Elastic IP address per subnet, a fixed address the hard-coded firmware can keep using. With instance-ID or IP targets, client IP preservation means the application sees the device's real source address rather than the load balancer's.

Option B is the wrong layer. An Application Load Balancer only understands HTTP and HTTPS, so it cannot carry an opaque TCP stream on port 9443, and it has no static IP addresses; clients are expected to resolve its DNS name, which these devices cannot do.

Option C does solve the static address problem, since Global Accelerator provides fixed anycast IP addresses. It fails on the endpoint named in the option: an Application Load Balancer still cannot terminate a non-HTTP TCP protocol. Global Accelerator in front of a *Network* Load Balancer would work, but that is not what is offered.

Option D is a legacy load balancer that AWS no longer recommends for new designs. More concretely, it has no static IP addresses either (like an Application Load Balancer it is reached by DNS name), so the firmware constraint alone rules it out, whatever proxy protocol would do for the source address.

Reference: What is a Network Load Balancer?

Practice Test 7 ›

Study guides for SAA-C03

AWS Developer Associate exam guide: DVA-C02 to DVA-C03AWS Developer Associate exam: DVA-C02 ends 30 November 2026 and DVA-C03 starts 1 December. What changes, which to sit, format, price and study plan.
AWS interview questions: scenarios, freshers to experiencedAWS interview questions on EC2, Lambda, S3, databases, VPC and IAM, by level, with four scenarios worked end to end and the facts old answers get wrong.
AWS Security Specialty: is it worth it, and what's testedAWS Security Specialty (SCS-C03): who it's worth it for, the six domains, new question types, price, and how it compares with CISSP.
SAA-C03 exam guide: what's on it and how to passSAA-C03 exam guide for 2026: the four domains, 65 questions in 130 minutes, price in USD and INR, the October 2026 guide update and a study plan.
AWS Service Control Policies Explained: SCPs and DenialsAWS service control policies explained: how SCPs cap permissions, why admins still get access denied, inheritance, deny vs allow lists and the exam traps.
Business Automation Examples: McDonald's to Step FunctionsBusiness automation examples from McDonald's, KFC, Ford and Toyota, the four moves they share, what to automate first, and AWS Step Functions.
How AI Is Changing Software Jobs: Where to PrepareHow AI is changing software jobs: what history shows, the evidence on junior developers, what Klarna learned, new AI roles and five domains to prepare for.
How AWS Certification Exams Work: Scoring and RenewalHow AWS certification exams work: levels, booking, question types, unscored questions, scaled scores, pass marks, validity and how recertification works.
How Netflix Uses AWS: Control Plane, CDN and ChaosHow Netflix uses AWS: the 2008 outage behind the move, control plane vs Open Connect, chaos engineering, multi-Region design and what it teaches for exams.
What Is Amazon RDS? Multi-AZ, Read Replicas and BackupsWhat is Amazon RDS? Engines, Multi-AZ, read replicas, backups, RDS Proxy, Aurora and pricing explained, with the traps that AWS exams set around each one.
What Is AWS Lambda? Triggers, Concurrency and Cold StartsWhat is AWS Lambda? How functions run, cold starts, triggers vs event source mappings, concurrency, layers, aliases, pricing and the exam traps.
What jobs can you get with AWS Cloud Practitioner?What jobs can you get with AWS Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)? The roles it helps with, the ones it won't land on its own, and what to add next.
AWS CloudOps Engineer Associate (SOA-C03) exam guideAWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) replaced SysOps Administrator. Format, cost, the five domains, what changed and how to prepare.
Which AWS certification should you get? 2026 roadmapWhich AWS certification to get first, by role and experience, with each exam's status in October 2026, what is changing, and prices in USD and INR.
What Is AWS Glue? Data Catalog, Crawlers and ETL JobsWhat is AWS Glue? The Data Catalog, crawlers, ETL jobs and DPUs, workflows, streaming, job bookmarks, Flex and Data Quality, plus the traps AWS exams set.
AWS Edge Locations and CloudFront, ExplainedHow AWS edge locations work: CloudFront POPs, regional edge caches, the request path, edge location vs Region, and the Global Accelerator exam trap.
What Is Amazon EC2? Instances, AMIs, EBS and Auto ScalingAmazon EC2 explained: instances, AMIs, instance types, security groups, EBS, Auto Scaling groups and pricing options, with the traps AWS exams set.
Amazon S3 storage classes and lifecycle rulesHow S3 storage classes, Intelligent-Tiering and lifecycle rules work, with the retrieval fees and minimum durations that AWS exam questions turn on.
AWS disaster recovery strategies, RTO and RPOBackup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active/active on AWS, how RTO and RPO pick between them, and the services each strategy uses.
IAM users, roles and policies on AWSHow IAM users, roles, identity-based and resource-based policies, cross-account access, SCPs and permissions boundaries fit together for AWS exams.
SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge on AWSWhen to use an SQS queue, an SNS topic or an EventBridge bus, plus fan-out, FIFO ordering, visibility timeouts and dead-letter queues for AWS exams.
The AWS shared responsibility model explainedWhat AWS secures and what you secure on EC2, RDS, Lambda and S3, how the line moves with each service, and how Cloud Practitioner questions test it.
VPC endpoints vs NAT gateways on AWSWhen to use gateway endpoints, interface endpoints (PrivateLink) or a NAT gateway for private subnets, and the cost and security trade-offs exams test.