SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A regional web application for a content publishing system must fail over automatically to a secondary Region if the primary endpoint becomes unhealthy. Which two services or features are required? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently assume Route 53 alone is sufficient, forgetting that the secondary Region must have a fully deployed and running application stack to receive traffic after failover.
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
✓
Route 53 failover routing with health checks
Option B is correct because Route 53 failover routing with health checks automatically redirects DNS queries to the secondary endpoint when the primary health check is deemed unhealthy, providing the required automatic failover without custom scripts. Option D is correct because a deployed standby application stack in the secondary Region is necessary to actually serve traffic after failover; DNS redirection alone cannot run the application. Option A is incorrect because AWS Organizations service control policies govern permissions and guardrails, not traffic failover or health-based routing. Option C is incorrect because S3 Transfer Acceleration only speeds up uploads to S3 buckets and does not provide regional failover or health checking.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Organizations service control policies
Why it's wrong here
SCPs govern maximum permissions for accounts in an organisation; they cannot detect endpoint health or trigger cross-Region failover. They are tempting because they enforce guardrails centrally, which is the right tool for restricting services across accounts, not for resilience routing.
- ✓
Route 53 failover routing with health checks
Why this is correct
Route 53 failover routing with health checks monitors the primary endpoint and automatically redirects DNS to the secondary when it turns unhealthy. This satisfies the automatic failover constraint without custom operational scripts, since health evaluation and DNS switching are managed by Route 53 itself.
- ✗
S3 Transfer Acceleration
Why it's wrong here
S3 Transfer Acceleration speeds uploads to a bucket via edge locations; it neither monitors endpoint health nor redirects traffic between Regions. It is tempting for globally distributed uploads where latency, not failover, is the design driver.
- ✓
A deployed standby application stack in the secondary Region
Why this is correct
A running standby stack in the secondary Region gives Route 53 a healthy target to fail over to, so traffic actually serves content after the switch. Without it, failover routing would resolve to nothing, breaking the stem's automatic recovery requirement.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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JA
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.