SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✓

  Create a primary failover record that points to the primary ALB and associates a Route 53 health check.

  Why this is correct

  A primary failover record designates the active endpoint in an active-passive configuration. Route 53 associates a health check with this record, and as long as the check returns healthy, every DNS response returns the primary ALB's IP address. When that health check fails, Route 53 stops serving the primary record and instead returns the secondary failover record, enabling automatic regional failover.

• ✗

  Create a weighted record set that sends 50 percent of traffic to each Region.

  Why it's wrong here

  A weighted record set with a 50/50 split balances traffic across both ALBs simultaneously, which is appropriate for load distribution or canary testing. Weighted routing does not define one endpoint as primary and another as backup; if a health check disables one record, Route 53 simply reroutes all traffic to the other healthy record, but there is no ordered failover relationship. The scenario calls for a deliberate primary/secondary design, not proportional traffic splitting.

• ✓

  Create a secondary failover record that points to the secondary ALB.

  Why this is correct

  The secondary failover record provides the standby destination that Route 53 returns only after the primary health check has failed. It is configured as a failover record with a role of 'Secondary' and, unlike the primary, typically does not have its own health check because it should only serve traffic when the primary is unhealthy. Without this record, a failed primary would cause a DNS failure because Route 53 would have no fallback address to return.

• ✗

  Create a latency-based record set so Route 53 always prefers the fastest Region.

  Why it's wrong here

  Latency-based routing selects the Region that offers the lowest latency for each individual client, so geographically distributed clients may be sent to different Regions concurrently. This creates an active-active pattern in which both ALBs normally serve traffic, rather than keeping one inactive until the other fails. The routing decision is based on network performance, not an explicit failover order, so it does not implement a strict primary-to-secondary failover policy.

• ✗

  Create a multivalue answer record to return both ALB addresses on each lookup.

  Why it's wrong here

  A multivalue answer record returns up to eight healthy IP addresses per response, chosen randomly via DNS, and each value must be associated with its own health check. This approach improves availability by giving clients multiple endpoints to try, but it lacks any notion of a primary or secondary relationship among the records. It also requires clients to handle multiple addresses and retries, whereas Route 53 failover routing actively replaces an unhealthy primary with a designated secondary in the DNS response.

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