A company has a primary application in us-east-1 and a standby environment in us-west-2. Users should go to the primary site while it is healthy and automatically switch to the standby site if the primary fails. Which Route 53 routing policy should they use?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
Distractor review
Weighted routing
Weighted routing splits traffic by percentage, but it does not automatically prefer one healthy endpoint.
Best answer
Failover routing with health checks
Route 53 failover routing is designed for active-passive resilience. You define a primary record and a secondary record, then attach health checks so DNS answers shift to the standby when the primary is unhealthy. This provides a simple disaster recovery pattern for user-facing endpoints without requiring application-level traffic management.
Distractor review
Geolocation routing
Geolocation routes based on user location, not on which site is healthy during an outage.
Distractor review
Latency-based routing
Latency-based routing selects the fastest endpoint, but it is not the same as primary-and-standby failover.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
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FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this SAA-C03 question test?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Failover routing with health checks — Route 53 failover routing with health checks matches an active-passive disaster recovery design. You publish a primary endpoint for normal operation and a secondary endpoint as the backup. If the health check fails, Route 53 stops returning the primary record and directs users to the standby site. This is an easy and practical DNS-based resilience pattern for associate-level architecture questions. Why others are wrong: Weighted routing is for traffic distribution, not health-based promotion of a standby. Geolocation routing is useful for locality or regulatory needs, but it does not perform failover. Latency-based routing optimizes response times and can still send traffic to a faster but unhealthy endpoint if health checks are not part of the decision.
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.
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