SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A financial services company runs a critical application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The application must be able to survive the failure of an entire AWS Region. The company wants a cost-effective solution that minimizes operational overhead. Which approach should the architect recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that Global Accelerator or cross-Region log replication provides regional failover, when only a full deployment in a second Region with DNS failover can keep the application available.
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 Regions with an Auto Scaling group in each, and use Amazon Route 53 failover routing with health checks.
To survive a regional failure, the application must be deployed in at least two Regions with independent compute capacity. Route 53 failover routing with health checks automatically directs traffic to the healthy Region, providing resilience with minimal manual intervention and operational overhead.
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 one Region and take regular Amazon EBS snapshots copied to another Region.
Why it's wrong here
EBS snapshots provide data backup but do not automatically provision compute capacity in another Region. Recovering from a regional failure would require manual steps to launch instances and restore volumes, which is not automatic and adds significant operational overhead.
- ✓
Deploy the application in two Regions with an Auto Scaling group in each, and use Amazon Route 53 failover routing with health checks.
Why this is correct
A multi-Region active-passive or active-active deployment with Route 53 failover routing and health checks automatically shifts traffic to the healthy Region if the primary fails. This provides regional resilience with minimal operational overhead compared to custom DNS or manual failover.
- ✗
Deploy the application in one Region and use 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 create a copy of the application in another Region. If the single Region fails, the application remains unavailable, so this does not meet the regional resilience requirement.
- ✗
Deploy the application in two Regions and use an Amazon S3 cross-Region replication bucket to store application logs.
Why it's wrong here
Replicating logs to another Region does not make the application itself available in that Region. The compute and load balancing components would still be missing, so the application would not survive a regional failure despite the log replication.
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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
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