Exercise 1: Choosing a Load Balancer for Path-Based Microservice Routing — Possible Solution
====================================================================

The requirement described -- routing /orders and /inventory requests
to two different backend services based on the URL path -- is
specifically content-based routing at the HTTP level, which requires
inspecting the request's own path, not just its IP address and port.

An Application Load Balancer (ALB) operates at Layer 7 (the
application layer), meaning it can actually read HTTP-level details
like the URL path and route accordingly -- exactly the real capability
this scenario needs.

A Network Load Balancer (NLB) operates at Layer 4 (the transport
layer) only. It can see IP addresses and ports, but has no real
visibility into HTTP content at all -- it has no way to distinguish a
request to /orders from a request to /inventory, since from its own
perspective both are simply TCP connections on the same port.

ANSWER: An Application Load Balancer (ALB) is the right choice here.
NLB would be a poor fit specifically because it operates below the
HTTP layer entirely and cannot inspect or route based on URL paths --
the exact capability this microservices routing scenario requires.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
------------------------------
This correctly identifies WHY NLB can't do path-based routing (it
operates at a lower network layer with no visibility into HTTP
content) rather than simply stating "NLB doesn't support that,"
directly applying the chapter's own Layer 7 vs. Layer 4 distinction to
a concrete scenario.