DOP-C02 Resilient Cloud Solutions Practice Question
A company uses Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to an Application Load Balancer. They want to improve availability by routing traffic to multiple ALBs in different AWS Regions. Which routing policy should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse latency-based routing with geolocation routing, mistakenly thinking that geographic proximity equals low latency, but latency-based routing uses actual network measurements rather than fixed geographic boundaries.
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
✓
Latency-based routing policy
Latency-based routing policy uses AWS-measured round-trip time data to direct each user to the AWS Region offering the fastest response, and each record can have an associated Route 53 health check; when the primary region's endpoint fails its health check, Route 53 automatically routes to the next lowest-latency healthy region. This combination of performance optimization and health-aware failover, without manual intervention, makes it the best fit for improving availability and performance across multiple regional ALBs. (Note: weighted routing policy also supports per-record health checks and will automatically exclude an unhealthy endpoint from rotation, redistributing traffic among the remaining healthy weighted records -- it is not correct that weighted routing requires manual updates to fail over.)
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Latency-based routing policy
Why this is correct
Latency-based routing policy uses AWS-measured round-trip time data to direct each user to the endpoint that offers the fastest response, and it supports health checks on each record. When the primary endpoint fails its health check, Route 53 automatically selects the next lowest-latency healthy endpoint, providing seamless active-passive failover without manual intervention. This combination of performance optimization and health-aware failover makes it the correct choice for an application with multiple regional endpoints.
- ✗
Weighted routing policy
Why it's wrong here
Weighted routing policy distributes traffic across multiple records by assigning relative weights to each, commonly used for A/B testing or blue/green deployments. However, it does not automatically remove an unhealthy record from the rotation; Route 53 continues to route traffic to a down endpoint unless you manually update the weight or delete the record. Since the requirement involves automatic failover based on application health, this policy lacks the necessary health-check-driven rerouting.
- ✗
Geolocation routing policy
Why it's wrong here
Geolocation routing policy determines the DNS response based on the geographic origin of the query, letting you route users to region-specific content or enforce regulatory compliance. While you can associate health checks with geolocation records, the primary selection and failover behavior are tied to the query's location, not to the current latency or availability of the endpoints. This policy is unsuitable because it doesn't prioritize the nearest or healthiest region, and it may leave users with a poor failover experience outside the intended geographic mapping.
- ✗
Simple routing policy
Why it's wrong here
Simple routing policy supports only a single record per name, and if you specify multiple values, Route 53 returns them to clients in random order without any health checking or automatic failover. This policy is intended for basic name resolution, not for multi-region high-availability architectures, as it cannot detect an unhealthy endpoint and reroute traffic to a healthy alternate. For a production application that requires continuous availability, the lack of health checks and failover logic makes simple routing completely inadequate.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DOP-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 DOP-C02 exam.