I am confused with Zuul role in Microservice architecture. zuul acts as a proxy and loadbalancer for internal communication between the services where in lets say no authentication is required. zuul acts as a Api gateway which can take care of Authentication and access control functionalities for the requests coming from UI or some other external clients. So the same zuul instance can take care of both the objectives. How it is handled in best scenario possible. i am novice in architecture side of microservices. please excuse me if it is a silly question. Thanks in advance.

zuul as Api Gateway with Authentication vs as Load balancer for internal service communication

I am confused with Zuul role in Microservice architecture.

zuul acts as a proxy and loadbalancer for internal communication between the services where in lets say no authentication is required.
zuul acts as a Api gateway which can take care of Authentication and access control functionalities for the requests coming from UI or some other external clients.

So the same zuul instance can take care of both the objectives. How it is handled in best scenario possible.

i am novice in architecture side of microservices. please excuse me if it is a silly question.

Thanks in advance.