SAA-C03 Practice Question: Route 53 Failover routing provides active-passive…
A company hosts a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in us-east-1. A static failover site is hosted in an S3 bucket with static website hosting enabled. The company needs automatic DNS failover to the S3 bucket if the primary ALB becomes unhealthy. Which Route 53 configuration achieves this?
⚠ Common exam trap
Route 53 offers multiple routing policies. Failover routing is active-passive — one primary resource, one standby. Weighted routing splits traffic percentages (active-active). Latency routing picks the lowest-latency endpoint. Geolocation routes by user geography. Only Failover routing provides automatic primary/secondary switchover based on health checks. Weighted routing at 100%/0% does NOT failover when the 100% target fails.
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
✓
Configure Route 53 Failover routing with a health check on the ALB as PRIMARY and the S3 bucket website endpoint as SECONDARY
Route 53 Failover routing uses health checks to route traffic to a primary resource and automatically switch to a secondary when the primary health check fails. Configuration: Create a Route 53 health check targeting the ALB endpoint. Create a PRIMARY alias A record pointing to the ALB with the health check associated. Create a SECONDARY alias A record pointing to the S3 static website endpoint. When the ALB health check fails, Route 53 returns the S3 endpoint 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.
- ✓
Configure Route 53 Failover routing with a health check on the ALB as PRIMARY and the S3 bucket website endpoint as SECONDARY
Why this is correct
Failover routing is the correct Route 53 policy for active-passive architecture, where the ALB is the primary endpoint and the S3 static website endpoint is the secondary. You configure a primary record pointing to the ALB, associate it with a Route 53 health check that monitors the ALB, and create a secondary record pointing to the S3 website endpoint. When the health check fails, Route 53 automatically returns the S3 endpoint, providing DNS-level failover. The S3 bucket must be configured for static website hosting with a publicly accessible endpoint, and this setup requires no manual intervention to switch traffic.
- ✗
Configure Route 53 Weighted routing with 100% weight on the ALB and 0% on the S3 bucket
Why it's wrong here
Weighted routing splits traffic based on configured weights and does not implement active-passive failover. A record with 0% weight is never returned in DNS responses, so if the ALB becomes unhealthy, Route 53 will not automatically start sending traffic to the S3 bucket. Even if a health check is associated, weighted routing only removes unhealthy weighted records from rotation; with 100% weight on the ALB and 0% on S3, there is no healthy record with nonzero weight to fail over to, so the site would go down.
- ✗
Configure Route 53 Latency routing with records in both regions to route to the healthiest endpoint
Why it's wrong here
Latency routing selects the endpoint with the lowest network latency for each client, which is not the same as health-based primary/secondary failover. If you create records in both regions, Route 53 will route users to S3 whenever S3's region is closer, even when the ALB is healthy, violating the requirement for an active-passive setup. Associating health checks with latency records can suppress unhealthy endpoints, but it still doesn't provide a deterministic primary/secondary ordering; latency routing inherently optimizes for speed, not failover semantics.
- ✗
Configure Route 53 Geolocation routing with North American users directed to the ALB and all others to S3
Why it's wrong here
Geolocation routing directs traffic based on the client's geographic location rather than endpoint health, so it cannot implement automatic failover from the ALB to S3. If North American users are pinned to the ALB record, they will continue to receive that record even when the ALB is unhealthy because geolocation routing only fails over when you define overlapping records and a default fallback, which is not part of this configuration. Additionally, users outside North America would always be sent to S3 even when the ALB is healthy, making the routing policy unsuitable for a primary/secondary architecture.
Visual reference
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 |
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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