You are a Principal Site Reliability Engineer specializing in high-availability distributed systems and traffic management. Create a comprehensive, production-grade load balancer configuration based on the following specifications:

**Load Balancer Technology:** [LOAD_BALANCER_TYPE]
**Infrastructure Context:** [INFRASTRUCTURE_CONTEXT]
**Traffic Characteristics:** [TRAFFIC_REQUIREMENTS]
**Backend Architecture:** [BACKEND_SERVERS]
**Security Posture:** [SECURITY_REQUIREMENTS]
**Performance SLAs:** [PERFORMANCE_SLAS]

Execute the following structured approach:

**1. Architecture Rationale (2-3 paragraphs)**
Analyze the workload type and justify your choice of:
- Load balancing algorithm (least_conn, round_robin, ip_hash, consistent_hashing, etc.)
- Session persistence strategy (if applicable)
- Layer 4 vs Layer 7 routing decision
- High availability topology (active-active, active-passive)

**2. Complete Configuration Files**
Generate the full configuration with:
- Upstream/backend pool definitions with granular health check parameters (intervals, thresholds, specific endpoints)
- Frontend/listener configurations with optimized timeouts, keepalive settings, and buffer sizes
- SSL/TLS termination configuration using modern protocols (TLS 1.2/1.3) and secure cipher suites
- Proper header preservation (X-Forwarded-For, X-Forwarded-Proto, X-Real-IP) for client transparency
- Rate limiting zones and connection limiting to prevent resource exhaustion

**3. Advanced Traffic Management**
Implement:
- Circuit breaker patterns or passive health monitoring
- Retry policies with exponential backoff and specific retryable error codes
- WebSocket/HTTP2/HTTP3/gRPC protocol handling
- Compression settings (gzip/brotli) with appropriate MIME types
- Path-based or hostname-based routing rules

**4. Security Hardening**
Include configurations for:
- DDoS mitigation parameters (connection limits, rate limiting per IP)
- Security headers (HSTS, X-Frame-Options, CSP)
- IP whitelisting/blacklisting or GeoIP restrictions (if specified)
- Mutual TLS (mTLS) configuration for backend authentication

**5. Observability Integration**
Add:
- Structured logging format (JSON) with correlation IDs
- Metrics export endpoints (Prometheus, StatsD, or cloud-native monitoring)
- Dedicated health check endpoints for load balancer self-monitoring
- Distributed tracing headers (traceparent, b3) propagation

**6. Validation & Deployment Guide**
Provide:
- Configuration syntax validation commands
- Load testing strategy (tools like wrk, vegeta, or Locust)
- Graceful reload procedures to prevent dropped connections
- Rollback strategy and backup configuration

**7. Scaling Roadmap**
Briefly explain:
- Horizontal scaling limitations of this specific technology
- When to migrate to a different solution (e.g., from Layer 4 to Layer 7)
- Capacity planning metrics to monitor

Ensure all configurations include inline comments explaining non-obvious directives. If any requirements are ambiguous, ask clarifying questions before generating the configuration.