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 multi-region Active-Active application using Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing. The application runs on EC2 instances behind Network Load Balancers (NLBs) in two AWS regions. The health checks are configured for the NLBs. What should the company do to ensure that traffic is sent only to healthy endpoints?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Use Route 53 latency-based routing and associate health checks.
Route 53 latency-based routing directs traffic to the region with the lowest latency for the user. By associating health checks with the latency records, Route 53 automatically excludes any endpoint that fails its health check (e.g., an unhealthy NLB) from DNS responses, ensuring traffic is sent only to healthy endpoints. This meets the requirement for an Active-Active multi-region setup where both regions serve traffic simultaneously.
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.
✓
Use Route 53 latency-based routing and associate health checks.
Why this is correct
Latency routing combined with health checks sends traffic only to healthy endpoints with the lowest latency.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Use Route 53 geolocation routing and associate health checks.
Why it's wrong here
Geolocation routing routes based on user location, not latency, and health checks are not supported.
✗
Use Route 53 weighted routing and associate health checks.
Why it's wrong here
Weighted routing distributes traffic by weight, not latency.
✗
Use Route 53 failover routing with primary and secondary records.
Why it's wrong here
Failover routing is for active-passive, not active-active.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often confuse latency-based routing with failover routing, assuming failover is required for health checks, but latency-based routing with health checks supports Active-Active while failover routing is strictly Active-Passive.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Route 53 latency-based routing uses a global network of latency measurement points to estimate the best region for each user, updating DNS responses dynamically. When health checks are associated, Route 53 evaluates the health of the NLB endpoint (e.g., via TCP or HTTP health checks) and removes unhealthy records from DNS responses within a few seconds (TTL-dependent). In a real-world scenario, if one region's NLB fails, Route 53 automatically reroutes all traffic to the healthy region without manual intervention, maintaining application availability.
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 company's IT admin needs to give a contractor read-only access to production logs without sharing account credentials. Using role-based access control (RBAC) and temporary scoped permissions — not a permanent shared password — is the correct pattern. Questions like this test whether you can apply least-privilege access across cloud identity services.
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: Use Route 53 latency-based routing and associate health checks. — Route 53 latency-based routing directs traffic to the region with the lowest latency for the user. By associating health checks with the latency records, Route 53 automatically excludes any endpoint that fails its health check (e.g., an unhealthy NLB) from DNS responses, ensuring traffic is sent only to healthy endpoints. This meets the requirement for an Active-Active multi-region setup where both regions serve traffic simultaneously.
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.
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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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