What function does a Gateway Load Balancer primarily serve?

The primary function of a Gateway Load Balancer is to manage traffic to virtual appliances. This service simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of third-party virtual appliances, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems, by seamlessly integrating them into the AWS network. When using a Gateway Load Balancer, traffic can be directed to these appliances while automatically handling the distribution and load balancing among the instances of the virtual appliance, enabling efficient traffic flow and robust performance.

Gateway Load Balancers combine the benefits of Layer 3 (network) load balancing with the capabilities of Layer 7 (application) load balancing. This design not only optimizes the performance of virtual appliances but also allows for easier scaling and resilience, leading to enhanced security and access control strategies in a cloud environment.

In contrast, other options serve different purposes within the AWS ecosystem. Routing traffic to Amazon RDS databases is primarily managed through RDS endpoints, and distributing incoming traffic across multiple regions typically involves using Route 53 or Global Accelerator. Balancing load among application servers is generally handled by Application Load Balancers or Classic Load Balancers, which focus primarily on distributing client traffic to multiple servers based on their application layer information. Thus, option B is the most accurate representation of the function served by a