A company hosts a public API using two AWS regions behind a single custom domain. Route 53 is configured with latency-based routing and health checks. During a regional outage, application metrics confirm the primary API is unhealthy, but clients still resolve to the primary region for most requests. Which DNS configuration change will most directly ensure automatic failover to the secondary region when the primary fails?

Change the record type to A/AAAA alias with an active-active routing policy so both regions always receive equal traffic.

Active-active routing is intended to split traffic across regions regardless of health. It does not provide the required behavior of preferring the secondary only when the primary health check fails.

Keep latency-based routing but shorten the health check interval to 5 seconds.

Shorter health check intervals may speed detection, but latency-based routing does not implement deterministic primary/secondary selection during outages. Depending on routing behavior and cached DNS responses, clients can still receive answers that favor the primary region.

Use geolocation routing so requests from each country route to the nearest region.

Geolocation routing chooses targets based on user location, not service health. It can continue routing to the unhealthy primary region if it still appears “nearest” for many clients.

What does this SAA-C03 question test?

Authentication checks who the user is.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Switch to Route 53 failover routing: configure the primary record with the primary health check and the secondary record with the secondary failover health check. — Latency-based routing is not an outage-driven primary/secondary failover mechanism. Even with health checks, latency routing can still provide primary answers for many clients and does not guarantee a clean failover decision model. To ensure automatic failover during a primary regional outage, use Route 53 failover routing with explicit primary and secondary records tied to health checks. Route 53 will resolve to the primary while healthy, and switch to the secondary when the primary fails, which best satisfies the stated requirement. A) Active-active sends traffic to both regions even when the primary is unhealthy, which does not ensure failover. C) Reducing the health check interval changes detection speed but not the routing policy’s selection model. D) Geolocation ignores health status and is not a failover strategy.

What should I do if I get this SAA-C03 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.