CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A company needs a service to translate domain names (like www.example.com) into IP addresses, check the health of their web servers, and automatically redirect traffic to a healthy backup server if the primary server fails. Which AWS service provides all of these capabilities?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse CloudFront's edge caching and origin failover (which only works for specific HTTP errors) with Route 53's DNS-level health checks and failover, which operate at the network layer and can redirect traffic before it even reaches the web server.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53 is a DNS web service that translates domain names to IP addresses. It also offers health checks that monitor the availability of web servers and can automatically route traffic away from unhealthy endpoints to healthy ones using DNS failover routing policies.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon VPC
Why it's wrong here
Amazon VPC enables you to provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud, giving you full control over your virtual networking environment including IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, and gateways. While VPCs often use Route 53 for private DNS resolution, the VPC service itself does not host authoritative DNS records or perform health checks. VPC does not evaluate endpoint availability or route traffic based on health status, and failover between resources requires an external DNS or traffic-management service like Route 53, not the VPC's networking primitives.
- ✗
Amazon CloudFront
Why it's wrong here
Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the delivery of static and dynamic content by caching objects at edge locations and routing user requests to the optimal AWS origin, such as an S3 bucket or an Application Load Balancer. Although CloudFront supports origin failover by specifying primary and secondary origins, this mechanism operates at the HTTP/CDN layer and only responds to specific origin response failures, not as an authoritative DNS health-check-based routing policy. It does not resolve domain names authoritatively, perform continuous health checks on arbitrary endpoints, or implement DNS-level failover routing like Route 53, so it cannot fulfill the core requirements of this question.
- ✓
Amazon Route 53
Why this is correct
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service that translates domain names into IP addresses and offers robust health-checking and traffic-routing capabilities. It continuously checks the health of configured endpoints by sending HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP requests from multiple global locations, and when the primary resource becomes unhealthy, the failover routing policy automatically redirects traffic to a healthy secondary resource. Route 53 uniquely combines authoritative DNS resolution, endpoint monitoring, and policy-based failover in a single service, making it the correct and complete answer for this scenario.
- ✗
AWS Direct Connect
Why it's wrong here
AWS Direct Connect establishes a dedicated, private network connection from your on-premises data center to AWS, bypassing the public internet to deliver consistent network throughput and lower latency. However, it is purely a Layer 2/3 transport mechanism; it has no visibility into DNS records, application endpoint status, or traffic policies. Direct Connect cannot perform health checks or reroute user requests based on the operational state of your resources, so it lacks the intelligent failover capabilities that Route 53 provides.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.