Question

Difficulty: MediumHigh-Performing and Scalable Network Architectures

A financial services company hosts a web application across two AWS Regions: us-west-2 and eu-central-1. The application is deployed behind Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both Regions to serve users in North America and Europe. Users are reporting high latency and poor connection stability during peak hours. The company requires a solution that minimizes latency by routing user traffic over the AWS global network backbone. The solution must also provide automatic failover in less than 30 seconds if a Region becomes unhealthy, without relying on DNS caching. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

  1. Deploy AWS Global Accelerator and register the Application Load Balancers in both Regions as endpoints.Answer
  2. B
    Configure Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing to resolve the application's domain name to the Application Load Balancers in both Regions.
  3. C
    Establish an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection from client locations to a centralized AWS Transit Gateway to route user traffic over a single VPN tunnel.
  4. D
    Configure stateful Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) at the VPC subnet level in both Regions to dynamically route client traffic to the Region with the lowest round-trip time.

Answer

Deploy AWS Global Accelerator and register the Application Load Balancers in both Regions as endpoints.
Deploying AWS Global Accelerator is the correct solution because it utilizes Anycast IP addresses to route user traffic to the nearest AWS Edge Location. From there, traffic travels over the AWS global network backbone, which significantly improves network performance and stability by reducing latency and jitter. Furthermore, AWS Global Accelerator monitors the health of the Application Load Balancers in both Regions and automatically redirects traffic to the healthy Region in less than 30 seconds. Since the Anycast IP addresses do not change, this failover mechanism completely bypasses DNS caching.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the requirements for network path optimization, low latency, and sub-30 second automatic failover without DNS caching.
Identify that DNS-based solutions like Route 53 cannot meet the failover time constraint due to client and resolver TTL caching.
DNS records are cached globally, making immediate redirection of client traffic during an outage unreliable through DNS adjustments alone.
2
Evaluate AWS services that bypass DNS caching and route traffic over the AWS global network backbone.
Determine that AWS Global Accelerator uses Anycast IP addresses to onboard client traffic at the nearest AWS edge location and route it over the internal backbone.
Anycast IPs remain constant, eliminating DNS propagation delay, while routing over the AWS backbone reduces latency and packet loss compared to the public internet.
3
Select the option that configures the application load balancers as endpoints behind AWS Global Accelerator.
Confirm that AWS Global Accelerator performs active health checks on the registered ALBs and automatically routes traffic away from unhealthy endpoints in under 30 seconds.
This directly fulfills the requirements for low latency, backbone routing, and fast, non-cached regional failover.

Key Concept

AWS Global Accelerator vs Route 53 Latency Routing
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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