AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – ProfessionalResilient Cloud SolutionsEasy

A global company operates a mission-critical web application distributed across multiple AWS regions. They need to ensure continuous availability and resilience against regional outages. The application uses Amazon Route 53 to resolve DNS. In the event of a primary region becoming unhealthy, traffic must be automatically routed to a healthy secondary region. What Route 53 routing policy and health check configuration should be used?

  1. AFailover routing policy with an associated health check on the primary region endpoint.
  2. BGeolocation routing policy with a health check on the primary region endpoint.
  3. CLatency routing policy with an associated health check on the primary region endpoint.
  4. DWeighted routing policy with different weights for each region and a health check.
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: A. Failover routing policy with an associated health check on the primary region endpoint.

A failover routing policy in Route 53 is specifically designed for disaster recovery. It allows you to specify primary and secondary resources, automatically routing traffic to the secondary if the primary becomes unhealthy based on associated health checks.

Why the other options are wrong

  • B. Geolocation routing directs users based on their geographic location, not on the health of the endpoint, so it won't automatically fail over during an outage.
  • C. Latency routing directs users to the region with the lowest latency, but it doesn't automatically fail over if an entire region becomes unhealthy; it would just try to find the next lowest latency, potentially to another unhealthy endpoint if not configured correctly.
  • D. Weighted routing distributes traffic based on weights and can be used for A/B testing or gradual rollouts, but it's not primarily for automatic disaster recovery failover in case of an outage.

Route 53 Failover Routing

Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy allows you to route traffic to a healthy backup resource when your primary resource becomes unhealthy, ensuring high availability and disaster recovery.

  • Routes traffic to a secondary resource if the primary fails.
  • Relies on Route 53 health checks to determine resource health.
  • Essential for achieving high availability and disaster recovery (DR).
  • Can be configured for active-passive or active-active setups.

Memory trick: When the primary road closes, Failover Routing automatically guides traffic to the detour.

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