Route 53 Latency-Based Routing Failover Configuration
A company is deploying a global application with users in North America and Europe. The application runs on EC2 instances in us-east-1 and eu-west-1. To reduce latency, the company wants to route users to the nearest region and provide automatic failover. Which combination of AWS services should be used?
Quick Answer
The correct answer is Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing and health checks. This combination works because latency-based routing directs each user to the AWS region that provides the lowest network latency, automatically sending North American users to us-east-1 and European users to eu-west-1. When health checks are attached to the routing records, Route 53 continuously monitors endpoint health; if the primary region’s EC2 instances become unhealthy, the DNS response automatically fails over to the next lowest-latency healthy region, ensuring seamless traffic redirection without manual intervention. On the AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty ANS-C01 exam, this scenario tests your understanding of how to combine routing policies with health checks for global application resilience—a common trap is assuming that failover routing alone handles latency, but failover routing requires a static primary/secondary setup and does not consider latency. Remember the memory tip: “Latency picks the fastest path; health checks keep the path alive.”
⚠ Common exam trap
AWS often tests the distinction between geolocation routing (which uses static geographic mapping) and latency-based routing (which uses dynamic network performance data), and candidates mistakenly choose geolocation routing because they think 'nearest region' means geographic proximity rather than network latency.
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 with latency-based routing and health checks.
Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing directs users to the region with the lowest latency, automatically routing traffic to the nearest region. Combined with health checks, if an endpoint fails, Route 53 automatically fails over to the next lowest-latency healthy endpoint, meeting both the latency reduction and automatic failover requirements.
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 CloudFront with origins in each region.
Why it's wrong here
CloudFront is for static and dynamic content caching, not for routing dynamic application traffic.
- ✗
AWS Global Accelerator with endpoint groups in each region.
Why it's wrong here
Global Accelerator provides anycast and health checks, but failover is region-level; still a valid option but not the simplest.
- ✗
Amazon Route 53 with geolocation routing and health checks.
Why it's wrong here
Geolocation routes based on user location, not actual latency.
- ✓
Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing and health checks.
Why this is correct
Latency routing directs users to the lowest-latency region, health checks provide failover.
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Variation 1. A company is designing a multi-Region application using Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing. The application must be highly available and failover automatically if an AWS Region becomes unavailable. What should the company do to meet these requirements?
easy- A.Configure latency-based routing with health checks and enable DNS failover.
- ✓ B.Configure active-passive failover with latency-based routing and associate health checks with each record.
- C.Configure geolocation routing policies and associate health checks.
- D.Configure weighted routing policies with equal weights for all regions.
Why B: It combines latency-based routing with health checks and active-passive failover, which allows Route 53 to route traffic to the region with the lowest latency under normal conditions and automatically fail over to the passive region if the active region's health check fails. This meets the high availability and automatic failover requirements by leveraging Route 53's DNS failover mechanism, which updates DNS responses based on health check status.
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This ANS-C01 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 ANS-C01 exam.