The answer is Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy and health checks on the primary ALB. This is correct because Route 53’s failover routing policy uses DNS-based traffic management, where health checks continuously monitor the primary ALB endpoint in us-east-1; when that health check fails, Route 53 automatically returns the IP addresses associated with the secondary failover record in us-west-2, enabling multi-region DNS failover with minimal downtime for stateless web applications. On the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional DOP-C02 exam, this scenario tests your understanding of DNS-level disaster recovery versus load balancer-level failover—a common trap is choosing an active-passive ALB configuration or Global Accelerator, but Route 53’s failover policy is the simplest and most cost-effective for region-level DR. A helpful memory tip: think of Route 53’s failover as a DNS circuit breaker—when the primary health check trips, traffic instantly routes to the secondary record.
DOP-C02 Resilient Cloud Solutions Practice Question
This DOP-C02 practice question tests your understanding of resilient cloud solutions. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company's DevOps team is designing a multi-region disaster recovery solution for a stateless web application. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in the us-east-1 region. The team needs to fail over to a secondary region (us-west-2) with minimal downtime in case of a regional outage. Which AWS service should the team use to route traffic to the healthy region?
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 with a failover routing policy and health checks on the primary ALB.
Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy and health checks on the primary ALB is correct because it allows DNS-based routing that automatically directs traffic to the secondary region (us-west-2) when the primary ALB in us-east-1 is unhealthy. The health checks monitor the ALB endpoint, and upon failure, Route 53 returns the failover record's IP addresses, enabling multi-region failover with minimal downtime for stateless web applications.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
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 Route 53 with a failover routing policy and health checks on the primary ALB.
Why this is correct
Route 53 automatically responds to health check failures by routing to the secondary region.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) cross-zone load balancing across regions.
Why it's wrong here
ELB cannot load balance across regions.
✗
AWS Global Accelerator with endpoint groups in both regions.
Why it's wrong here
Global Accelerator does health checks but does not provide DNS-level failover routing.
✗
Amazon CloudFront with a multi-origin setup and origin failover.
Why it's wrong here
CloudFront origin failover is for content delivery, not for active-passive regional failover.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often confuse AWS Global Accelerator's traffic dials and endpoint weights with a true failover mechanism, but Route 53 failover routing is the only service that provides a binary, health-check-driven switch between primary and secondary regions for DNS-based traffic routing.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Route 53 failover routing works by associating health checks with resource record sets; when the primary health check fails, the DNS TTL (default 60 seconds) must expire before clients receive the failover record, so setting a low TTL (e.g., 10 seconds) is critical for minimizing downtime. Under the hood, Route 53 uses a combination of DNS queries and health check probes (HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP) to determine endpoint status, and the failover is atomic at the DNS level, meaning all queries after TTL expiry return the secondary record. In real-world scenarios, this approach works well for stateless apps because clients can retry on connection failure, but stateful apps require additional session replication mechanisms.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A cloud solutions architect for a retail company is evaluating services for a new workload. The correct answer here reflects best practice for the specific scenario described — not a general cloud recommendation. Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option. Cloud exam questions reward reading the constraint carefully: the same technology can be right or wrong depending on the use case.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Resilient Cloud Solutions — This question tests Resilient Cloud Solutions — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy and health checks on the primary ALB. — Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy and health checks on the primary ALB is correct because it allows DNS-based routing that automatically directs traffic to the secondary region (us-west-2) when the primary ALB in us-east-1 is unhealthy. The health checks monitor the ALB endpoint, and upon failure, Route 53 returns the failover record's IP addresses, enabling multi-region failover with minimal downtime for stateless web applications.
What should I do if I get this DOP-C02 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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