A global external HTTP(S) load balancer is configured with GENERATED_COOKIE session affinity. Where is the affinity cookie created and set?

The correct answer is "By the load balancer proxy at the global frontend." For GENERATEDCOOKIE session affinity, the Google Cloud external HTTP(S) load balancer itself creates and inserts a cookie into the HTTP response. This cookie contains information that allows subsequent requests from the same client to be routed to the same backend instance group or NEG, ensuring session stickiness. "By each backend VM or service" is incorrect because the backend services are not responsible for generating the affinity cookie in this specific configuration. The load balancer handles this. "By Cloud DNS when resolving the LB IP" is incorrect because DNS is responsible for name resolution, not for managing HTTP session affinity cookies. "By Cloud CDN at the edge cache nodes" is incorrect because Cloud CDN caches content and does not manage session affinity for the origin load balancer.