Question

Difficulty: EasyEnhancing Reliability and Disaster Recovery

A solutions architect is configuring an active-passive multi-region disaster recovery solution using Amazon Route 53 failover routing. The architect creates a primary failover record pointing to the application load balancer in the primary region, and a secondary failover record pointing to the disaster recovery site in the secondary region. During a failure drill, the primary region is simulated to be completely offline, but client traffic continues to be routed to the primary region. What is the most likely cause of this behavior?

  1. A
    The primary Route 53 Private Hosted Zone has not been associated with the VPC in the secondary recovery region.
  2. The Route 53 failover routing record for the primary region is not associated with an active health check.Answer
  3. C
    Active-passive disaster recovery configurations do not support automatic DNS-level failover without a pilot light database replica.
  4. D
    The Route 53 health check could not reach the backend instances due to a missing NAT Gateway in the secondary region.

Answer

The Route 53 failover routing record for the primary region is not associated with an active health check.
For Route 53 active-passive failover routing to function, the primary routing record must be associated with an active Route 53 health check. If no health check is associated, Route 53 treats the primary endpoint as constantly healthy and will not redirect traffic to the secondary endpoint, even if the primary region experiences a complete failure.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze Route 53 active-passive failover mechanism.
Route 53 requires health checks to dynamically evaluate whether the primary endpoint is healthy or unhealthy.
Without a health check, Route 53 default behavior is to treat the endpoint as always healthy, which prevents any automatic failover actions from executing.
2
Identify the cause of the failure drill symptoms.
The traffic is still routed to the offline primary region because the routing record has no health check attached to detect the simulated outage.
Associating the record with a health check is the key prerequisite for Route 53 to route traffic to the secondary endpoint when the primary goes offline.

Key Concept

Route 53 Failover Routing and Health Check Association
Estimated Time:45s
Rate this question