SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application must be highly available and able to withstand the failure of an entire AWS Region. The company wants to minimize operational overhead and ensure that failover is automatic. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse weighted routing with failover routing. Weighted routing distributes traffic based on weights but does not automatically remove an unhealthy Region unless health checks are explicitly configured to do so, and even then, it may not fully redirect all traffic.
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
✓
Deploy the application in two AWS Regions. Use Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy and health checks to route traffic to the secondary Region if the primary becomes unhealthy.
To withstand a Region failure with automatic failover, the application must be deployed in at least two Regions. Route 53 failover routing with health checks automatically redirects traffic to the secondary Region when the primary is unhealthy. This minimizes operational overhead because the failover is managed by Route 53 and does not require manual intervention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Deploy the application in two AWS Regions. Use Amazon Route 53 with a weighted routing policy and equal weights for both Regions.
Why it's wrong here
Weighted routing distributes traffic across Regions but does not automatically fail over if one Region becomes unhealthy. If the primary Region fails, traffic would still be routed to it unless health checks are configured to remove it. This does not provide automatic failover.
- ✗
Deploy the application in two Availability Zones within a single Region. Use an Application Load Balancer to distribute traffic across both AZs.
Why it's wrong here
This provides high availability within a single Region but cannot withstand a Region-wide failure. A Region failure would take down all AZs in that Region. The requirement explicitly states the ability to withstand an entire Region failure, so this does not meet the requirement.
- ✓
Deploy the application in two AWS Regions. Use Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy and health checks to route traffic to the secondary Region if the primary becomes unhealthy.
Why this is correct
A multi-Region active-passive setup with Route 53 failover routing and health checks provides automatic failover at the DNS level. The secondary Region must have the same application stack and data replication. This meets the requirements for Region-level resilience and minimal operational overhead because failover is automatic.
- ✗
Deploy the application in a single Region using AWS Global Accelerator to route traffic to the nearest edge location.
Why it's wrong here
AWS Global Accelerator improves performance by routing traffic over the AWS global network, but it does not provide automatic failover to another Region unless you configure multiple endpoints in different Regions. By itself, it does not meet the Region-failure requirement.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
This SAA-C03 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 SAA-C03 exam.