What is the purpose of a load balancer in a cloud architecture?

A load balancer plays a crucial role in cloud architecture by distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers. This distribution ensures that no single server becomes overwhelmed by too much traffic, which can lead to performance degradation or even server failure. By balancing the load, it helps maintain high availability and reliability of applications, as users experience consistent performance, regardless of fluctuations in demand.

In addition to improving resource utilization and responsiveness, load balancers typically offer features such as health monitoring of the servers they manage. If one server becomes unresponsive, the load balancer can automatically route traffic to other healthy servers, further ensuring the reliability of the system. This capability is essential for applications that require high availability and can significantly enhance user experience in cloud environments.

Other choices relate to functions that do not involve traffic management or distribution. For instance, storing data securely, performing backups, and encrypting sensitive data are important tasks within cloud services but they do not pertain to the primary function of a load balancer.