AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01)Network DesignMedium
A global company operates a web application with users distributed across North America, Europe, and Asia. They have deployed identical application stacks in AWS Regions in N. Virginia, Ireland, and Singapore. The company wants to ensure that users are routed to the closest healthy application endpoint to minimize latency. If an entire region becomes unhealthy, traffic should automatically fail over to the next closest healthy region. Which Amazon Route 53 routing policy combination should be used to achieve this goal?
- AWeighted Routing Policy with Health Checks
- BLatency Routing Policy with Failover Routing Policy
- CSimple Routing Policy with Latency-Based Routing
- DGeolocation Routing Policy with Multi-Value Answer Routing
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: B. Latency Routing Policy with Failover Routing Policy
Latency Routing Policy routes users to the AWS Region that provides the lowest latency. Combining this with a Failover Routing Policy allows you to define primary and secondary regional endpoints. If the primary (lowest latency) region becomes unhealthy, Route 53 will automatically route traffic to the next closest healthy region, fulfilling both latency and disaster recovery requirements.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Weighted routing distributes traffic based on weights, not primarily latency or failover.
- C. Simple routing returns all values, and while latency-based routing helps, it doesn't inherently provide a failover mechanism if a region becomes unhealthy beyond just routing away from it.
- D. Geolocation routing routes based on user's geographic location, and multi-value answer returns up to 8 healthy records, which doesn't guarantee failover to the *next closest* healthy region in a specific order.
Route 53 Latency and Failover Routing
A combination of Route 53 routing policies to optimize user experience by directing traffic to the lowest-latency healthy endpoint, with an automatic fallback to another healthy endpoint if the primary fails.
- Latency routing minimizes network travel time for users.
- Failover routing ensures high availability by redirecting traffic from unhealthy endpoints.
- Can be combined to create resilient, performance-optimized global applications.
- Requires Route 53 health checks to determine endpoint health.
Memory trick: Route 53: Latency for Speed, Failover for Safety.