SOA-C02 Networking and Content Delivery Practice Question
A SysOps administrator needs to route traffic to multiple AWS regions for disaster recovery using Amazon Route 53. The primary region should receive all traffic unless it becomes unhealthy. Which routing policy should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse failover routing with weighted or latency routing, thinking they can achieve disaster recovery by distributing traffic, but only failover routing provides the required active-passive health-based failover behavior.
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
✓
Failover routing policy
Failover routing policy is correct because it allows you to configure an active-passive setup where all traffic is directed to a primary resource (e.g., an Elastic Load Balancer in the primary region) unless Route 53 health checks determine that the primary is unhealthy. When the primary fails, Route 53 automatically routes traffic to the secondary (disaster recovery) resource in another region. This directly meets the requirement of sending all traffic to the primary region unless it becomes unhealthy.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Failover routing policy
Why this is correct
Route 53 failover routing policy implements active-passive failover by using two records with the same name and type: a primary record associated with a health check and a secondary record. When the primary health check fails, Route 53 automatically returns the secondary record's value in DNS responses, directing traffic to the second resource. This policy is expressly designed to keep services available if the primary target becomes unhealthy, which matches the requirement to route traffic to multiple AWS endpoints with automatic failover.
- ✗
Geolocation routing policy
Why it's wrong here
Geolocation routing policy directs traffic according to the geographic location of the DNS query source, using continent, country, or US state to return the record that corresponds to that region. It is commonly used to localize content, enforce regional restrictions, or comply with data sovereignty, not to provide automatic failover between primary and standby resources. Unlike failover routing, geolocation does not need or evaluate health checks to reroute traffic when a resource becomes unhealthy; it simply maps users to the geographically appropriate endpoint.
- ✗
Latency routing policy
Why it's wrong here
Latency routing policy measures the round-trip time between the client's resolver and AWS regions to return the record from the region that offers the lowest latency for that query. This policy optimizes performance by directing users to the nearest or fastest region, but it does not automatically switch traffic away from a failed resource unless that region happens to be slower for the user. It cannot guarantee high availability or act as failover, because a failed resource in a low-latency region may still receive traffic while it is unhealthy.
- ✗
Weighted routing policy
Why it's wrong here
Weighted routing policy assigns a numeric weight to each record with the same name/type, and Route 53 returns each record proportionally to its weight, enabling A/B testing, blue/green deployments, or gradual traffic shifting across multiple resources. While you can attach health checks to weighted records so unhealthy endpoints receive zero weight, failover routing is the dedicated policy for the primary/backup automatic failover scenario described. Weighted routing is about controlling traffic distribution, not about promoting a standby resource when the primary is unhealthy.
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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.