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.”
ANS-C01 Network Design Practice Question
This ANS-C01 practice question tests your understanding of network design. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. 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 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?
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.
Option D is correct because 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.
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 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.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
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.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Route 53 latency-based routing uses a global latency database built from measurements between AWS regions and internet users, updating every 30 seconds to reflect real-time network conditions. When a health check fails, Route 53 removes the unhealthy record from the pool and routes traffic to the next lowest-latency healthy endpoint, providing sub-minute failover. This approach is ideal for global applications requiring both proximity-based routing and resilience, as it operates at the DNS level with a TTL as low as 60 seconds, balancing responsiveness and failover speed.
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.
Network Design — This question tests Network Design — 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 latency-based routing and health checks. — Option D is correct because 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.
What should I do if I get this ANS-C01 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.
About these practice questions
Courseiva creates original exam-style practice questions with explanations and wrong-answer analysis. It does not publish real exam questions, exam dumps, or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
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: Option B is correct because 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.
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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.
Question Discussion
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