SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A SaaS application is deployed in us-east-1 and us-west-2 behind separate ALBs. The business wants DNS to send new clients to the primary Region when it is healthy and automatically fail over to the secondary Region when the primary endpoint is unhealthy. Which two Route 53 settings are required? Select two.
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse failover routing with weighted or latency-based routing, assuming any multi-region setup with health checks will automatically fail over, but only failover routing provides the explicit primary/secondary failover behavior required.
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 a failover routing policy with a primary and secondary record.
A failover routing policy is correct because it allows you to designate one record as primary and another as secondary. Route 53 will route traffic to the primary record as long as it is healthy, and automatically fail over to the secondary record when the primary becomes unhealthy. This directly meets the requirement to send new clients to the primary region when healthy and fail over automatically.
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 failover routing policy with a primary and secondary record.
Why this is correct
Failover routing is designed specifically to send traffic to a secondary endpoint when the primary becomes unhealthy.
- ✓
Create a health check and associate it with the primary endpoint.
Why this is correct
Health checks give Route 53 the signal it needs to decide when the primary endpoint should stop receiving answers.
- ✗
Use weighted routing with a 50/50 traffic split between both Regions.
Why it's wrong here
Weighted routing distributes traffic, but it does not automatically fail over based on endpoint health.
- ✗
Use latency-based routing so clients always choose the fastest Region.
Why it's wrong here
Latency-based routing optimizes performance, but it is not the same as primary-secondary failover behavior.
- ✗
Use a geolocation policy without health checks.
Why it's wrong here
Geolocation routes by user location and still requires additional health-aware design for automatic failover.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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