SOA-C02 Networking and Content Delivery Practice Question
A company wants to provide low-latency access to a web application for users in North America and Europe. The application runs on EC2 instances in us-east-1 and eu-west-1. Which AWS service should be used to route users to the nearest region?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Global Accelerator's Anycast-based routing with DNS-based latency routing, but Global Accelerator optimizes the network path from the edge to the origin, not the user's initial routing to the nearest region, which is a DNS-level decision.
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
✓
Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing
Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing directs user traffic to the AWS region that provides the lowest latency for the end user. By configuring latency records for the EC2 instances in us-east-1 and eu-west-1, Route 53 responds to DNS queries with the IP address of the region that offers the best network performance, effectively routing users to the nearest region.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Application Load Balancer with cross-region load balancing
Why it's wrong here
An Application Load Balancer is a regional construct and has no native "cross-region load balancing" mode; it can distribute traffic only among targets within the same Region and across Availability Zones. To span Regions you would need to deploy a separate ALB in each Region and combine them with a global routing layer, which means this option cannot by itself send each user to the lowest-latency Region.
- ✗
Amazon CloudFront
Why it's wrong here
Amazon CloudFront is a CDN that reduces latency by caching static and dynamic content at edge locations, but it does not make per-request routing decisions among multiple application Regions based on network latency. Requests that miss the cache are forwarded to the configured origin (or failover origin), so CloudFront does not inherently enable latency-based regional endpoint selection for a dynamic web application.
- ✗
AWS Global Accelerator
Why it's wrong here
AWS Global Accelerator uses Anycast IPs to route users onto the AWS network at the nearest edge location, improving the network path, but it does not choose the application Region by comparing latency measurements to each region. Endpoint routing is governed by health, traffic dials, and endpoint weights, and with a single regional endpoint group all traffic terminates in that one Region — it lacks the per-DNS-query latency selection that Route 53 latency-based routing provides.
- ✓
Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing
Why this is correct
Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing sends each user's DNS query to the endpoint in the AWS Region that currently has the lowest latency from the user's DNS resolver. Route 53 maintains latency data for traffic between regions and the resolver, and returns the appropriate IP address for that region, enabling low-latency access when the application is deployed in multiple Regions.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SOA-C02 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 SOA-C02 exam.