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 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?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Configure active-passive failover with latency-based routing and associate health checks with each record.
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.
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.
✗
Configure latency-based routing with health checks and enable DNS failover.
Why it's wrong here
Latency routing alone does not provide failover; health checks must be associated with a failover record set.
✓
Configure active-passive failover with latency-based routing and associate health checks with each record.
Why this is correct
Correct: Active-passive failover with health checks and latency routing provides automatic regional failover.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Configure geolocation routing policies and associate health checks.
Why it's wrong here
Geolocation routes by user location, not latency or health.
✗
Configure weighted routing policies with equal weights for all regions.
Why it's wrong here
Weighted routing does not consider health or latency for failover.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often assume that simply enabling health checks with latency-based routing (Option A) is sufficient for automatic failover, but without explicitly configuring an active-passive failover policy, Route 53 does not have a defined secondary target to fail over to when all endpoints in a latency-based set become unhealthy.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Under the hood, Route 53 latency-based routing uses latency measurements between the user's DNS resolver and AWS regions to select the endpoint with the lowest latency. When combined with health checks and active-passive failover, Route 53 evaluates the health of the primary record and, if it fails, returns the secondary record's IP address, effectively performing a DNS-level failover with a TTL that can be set as low as 60 seconds to minimize downtime. In a real-world scenario, this setup is critical for applications requiring regional redundancy, as it ensures that traffic is redirected within minutes of a region outage, though DNS caching by clients and resolvers may introduce additional delay.
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: Configure active-passive failover with latency-based routing and associate health checks with each record. — 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.
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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Question Discussion
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