SOA-C02 Networking and Content Delivery Practice Question
Which TWO of the following are features of Amazon Route 53? (Select TWO.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Route 53's DNS-level health checking with application-layer features like SSL termination or caching, leading them to select options that belong to other AWS services like CloudFront or ALB.
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
✓
Health checking of resources
Amazon Route 53 is a DNS web service that provides domain name resolution, domain registration, and health checking of resources. Health checking monitors the availability and performance of endpoints (e.g., web servers) via HTTP/HTTPS/TCP requests, and can automatically failover DNS responses to healthy resources, ensuring high availability.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
SSL/TLS termination
Why it's wrong here
SSL/TLS termination requires terminating the encrypted session by holding the private key and decrypting traffic, which is performed by an application load balancer or web server. Route 53 operates purely at the DNS layer, answering queries over UDP/TCP port 53 and never participating in the TLS handshake or seeing encrypted payloads. Therefore, SSL/TLS termination is not a Route 53 feature.
- ✓
Health checking of resources
Why this is correct
Route 53 supports health checking of endpoints by actively sending periodic TCP, HTTP, or HTTPS requests to configured IPs or domains to verify availability. These health checks integrate with failover routing policies, allowing Route 53 to automatically remove unhealthy resources from DNS responses and direct traffic to healthy ones. This is a core feature that extends beyond basic name resolution.
- ✗
SSL certificate management
Why it's wrong here
SSL certificate management—including issuance, renewal, and deployment—is the responsibility of AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), not Route 53. While Route 53 can assist with ACM's DNS validation by automatically creating the required CNAME records, it does not generate, store, or manage certificates. Thus, this feature is incorrectly attributed to Route 53.
- ✓
Domain name registration
Why this is correct
Route 53 acts as a domain registrar, enabling customers to register and renew domain names directly through the service, and it provides integrated management of DNS records for those domains. It also offers WHOIS contact management, DNSSEC signing, and automatic creation of NS/SOA records upon registration. This capability makes Route 53 unique among many DNS-only providers.
- ✗
Content caching at edge locations
Why it's wrong here
Content caching at edge locations is a function of content delivery networks like Amazon CloudFront, which store copies of files at points of presence to reduce latency. Route 53 operates as an authoritative DNS service, resolving hostnames to IP addresses, and while it uses a global anycast network for fast responses, it never stores or caches web content. Therefore, content caching is not a Route 53 feature.
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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.