ANS-C01 Network Design Practice Question
A company is designing a multi-region active-active application using Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing with health checks. The application is deployed in us-east-1 and eu-west-1. During a load test, users in South America experience high latency despite the Route 53 configuration. What is the most likely cause?
⚠ Common exam trap
The ANS-C01 exam often tests the interaction between health checks and routing policies, where candidates assume latency-based routing always sends traffic to the lowest-latency region, forgetting that a failed health check overrides that decision and routes all traffic to the healthy region, even if it is geographically distant.
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
✓
The health check for one region is failing, causing all traffic to be routed to the remaining healthy region.
Latency-based routing directs traffic to the region with the lowest latency for the user. If a health check fails, Route 53 treats that region as unhealthy and stops routing traffic to it, even if it would otherwise provide lower latency. In this scenario, users in South America likely experience high latency because the eu-west-1 region (which might have lower latency for them) is marked unhealthy, forcing all traffic to us-east-1, which is farther away.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
The health check for one region is failing, causing all traffic to be routed to the remaining healthy region.
Why this is correct
If a region fails health check, traffic is routed to healthy regions, increasing latency for users far from that region.
- ✗
The company should use geolocation routing instead of latency-based routing.
Why it's wrong here
Geolocation routing is not required; latency-based routing works for multi-region active-active.
- ✗
The latency records are not refreshed frequently enough, causing stale routing decisions.
Why it's wrong here
Latency records are updated dynamically per query.
- ✗
The Route 53 health check is configured to use CloudWatch alarms, which introduced additional latency.
Why it's wrong here
Health checks use Route 53 health checkers, not CloudWatch alarms directly.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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