AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 584

A company runs a container application by using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The application includes microservices that manage customers and place orders. The company needs to route incoming requests to the appropriate microservices.

Which solution will meet this requirement MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Use the AWS Load Balancer Controller to provision a Network Load Balancer.
• B. Use the AWS Load Balancer Controller to provision an Application Load Balancer.
• C. Use an AWS Lambda function to connect the requests to Amazon EKS.
• D. Use Amazon API Gateway to connect the requests to Amazon EKS.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Using the AWS Load Balancer Controller to provision an Application Load Balancer (ALB) is the most cost-effective option because ALBs natively support Layer 7 routing, enabling path-based routing to different EKS target groups under a single load balancer. A Network Load Balancer operates at Layer 4 and does not support HTTP path-based routing natively, which would require more complex or expensive setups. Utilizing Amazon API Gateway or AWS Lambda to proxy these requests adds unnecessary architectural complexity and significantly higher transactional costs compared to a single ALB.