ANS-C01 Network Design Practice Question
A company is designing a global application that will serve users across North America and Europe. The application consists of a static website hosted on Amazon S3, a REST API hosted on Amazon API Gateway, and a backend application running on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The company wants to minimize latency for users by serving content from the closest AWS region. They also want to ensure high availability and automatic failover if a region becomes unavailable. The company is considering using Amazon Route 53 with a latency-based routing policy. However, they are concerned about DNS caching and propagation delays during failover. Which additional service should they use to improve the failover experience and provide a single endpoint for users?
⚠ Common exam trap
AWS often tests the misconception that CloudFront or DNS-based routing alone can solve latency and failover requirements for dynamic APIs, but Global Accelerator is the only service that provides static IPs and fast regional failover without DNS caching delays.
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
✓
Use AWS Global Accelerator to provide a static IP address and route traffic to the ALB in the closest healthy region
AWS Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to route traffic to the closest healthy endpoint via the Anycast static IP addresses, bypassing DNS caching and propagation delays. It provides a single fixed endpoint for users and integrates with the ALB in each region, automatically failing over to the next healthy region within seconds when health checks fail.
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 a Network Load Balancer in each region and configure Route 53 with failover routing
Why it's wrong here
NLB is regional and does not provide global routing; Route 53 failover relies on DNS TTL.
- ✗
Use Amazon CloudFront with multiple origins pointing to the S3 bucket and the ALB in each region
Why it's wrong here
CloudFront is for HTTP content and does not handle API traffic well; also, it does not support non-HTTP protocols.
- ✗
Use Lambda@Edge to dynamically route traffic based on the user's location
Why it's wrong here
Lambda@Edge is for content customization, not global traffic routing.
- ✓
Use AWS Global Accelerator to provide a static IP address and route traffic to the ALB in the closest healthy region
Why this is correct
Global Accelerator provides static IPs and fast failover using network layer routing.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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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.