SAA-C03 Route 53 Failover Routing Practice Question
A company runs the same public API in two regions (Region A and Region B), each fronted by an ALB. They want Route 53 to automatically route clients to the Region B API when Region A becomes unhealthy, with minimal configuration effort. Which Route 53 approach should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse latency-based routing with failover capabilities, assuming latency routing will automatically avoid unhealthy endpoints, but it only optimizes for speed and requires health checks to be manually integrated via a separate routing policy.
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 Route 53 failover routing with health checks for each region’s endpoint.
Route 53 failover routing with health checks is the correct choice because it automatically directs traffic to a secondary endpoint (Region B) when the primary endpoint (Region A) fails a health check. This provides active-passive failover with minimal configuration, as Route 53 monitors the health of each ALB and updates DNS responses accordingly without 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.
- ✗
Use a single Route 53 A record that points only to Region A’s ALB and manually update it after failures.
Why it's wrong here
A single-record setup does not provide automatic failover and still requires manual changes during outages.
- ✗
Use Route 53 latency-based routing with separate records for each region.
Why it's wrong here
Latency-based routing optimizes user proximity, but it does not automatically fail over based on health checks.
- ✓
Use Route 53 failover routing with health checks for each region’s endpoint.
Why this is correct
Failover routing works with health checks to move traffic from a primary endpoint to a secondary endpoint when the primary becomes unhealthy.
- ✗
Use weighted routing and set the Region B weight to 0 to ensure it is only used when needed.
Why it's wrong here
Weighted routing does not react to health status. Weight changes are not automatic failover responses.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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.