Question

Difficulty: EasyRoute 53 Routing Policies and DNS Failover Strategies

A company wants to set up an active-passive disaster recovery (DR) strategy for its primary web application running on an Application Load Balancer in the us-east-1 Region. The backup environment is a static maintenance page hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket in the us-west-2 Region. Which Amazon Route 53 configuration will meet this requirement with the least administrative effort during a failover event?

  1. A
    Configure an Amazon Route 53 Latency routing policy pointing to both the Application Load Balancer and the S3 bucket, relying on Route 53 to automatically direct all traffic to the S3 bucket if the primary Region experiences high latency.
  2. B
    Configure an Amazon Route 53 Weighted routing policy with the Application Load Balancer set to a weight of 100 and an Amazon RDS Read Replica in us-west-2 set to a weight of 0, expecting Route 53 to automatically promote and route traffic to the replica if the primary load balancer fails.
  3. Configure an Amazon Route 53 Failover routing policy, designating the Application Load Balancer as the primary record associated with an active health check, and the S3 bucket as the secondary record.Answer
  4. D
    Configure an Amazon Route 53 Geolocation routing policy pointing to the Application Load Balancer, and rely on a database replication mechanism to dynamically rewrite the DNS record to point to the S3 bucket during a failover.

Answer

Configure an Amazon Route 53 Failover routing policy, designating the Application Load Balancer as the primary record associated with an active health check, and the S3 bucket as the secondary record.
The correct configuration uses a Route 53 Failover routing policy. In this setup, the primary record points to the active application endpoint (the Application Load Balancer) and is associated with a health check. The secondary record points to the disaster recovery resource (the S3 bucket hosting the static page). Route 53 continuously monitors the health of the primary endpoint and automatically shifts traffic to the secondary endpoint if the primary endpoint fails the health check, requiring no manual intervention.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the primary active resource and the secondary passive resource.
The Application Load Balancer is the primary active endpoint, and the S3 bucket is the secondary passive endpoint.
Active-passive disaster recovery requires establishing a clear primary path for regular traffic and a secondary path for failover situations.
2
Select the Route 53 routing policy designed for active-passive recovery.
Select the Failover routing policy.
Failover routing is built specifically to redirect traffic when a primary resource becomes unhealthy.
3
Associate an active health check with the primary record.
Route 53 will monitor the health of the Application Load Balancer and fail over to the S3 bucket if the health check fails.
Without a health check on the primary record, Route 53 cannot determine whether the primary endpoint is healthy and will not trigger the failover.

Key Concept

Route 53 Failover routing policy allows solutions architects to implement active-passive disaster recovery configurations by directing traffic to a secondary resource when the primary resource's health check fails.
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