Question

Difficulty: EasyEnhancing Reliability and Disaster Recovery

A company hosts a public-facing application across two AWS Regions in an active-passive disaster recovery configuration. The primary region (us-east-1) and the secondary region (us-west-2) each have an Application Load Balancer (ALB) that routes traffic to Amazon EC2 instances. The company wants to configure Amazon Route 53 to automatically redirect client traffic to the secondary region if the primary region's application becomes unhealthy.

Which configuration should the solutions architect implement to achieve automatic failover to the secondary region?

  1. Create failover routing records in a Route 53 public hosted zone. Configure the primary record to point to the primary ALB with 'Evaluate Target Health' set to Yes and associate it with a health check that monitors the application's status. Configure the secondary record to point to the secondary ALB.Answer
  2. B
    Create failover routing records in a Route 53 public hosted zone. Configure the primary record to point to the primary ALB, but set 'Evaluate Target Health' to No and omit the health check association to minimize DNS query overhead.
  3. C
    Create failover routing records in a Route 53 private hosted zone. Configure the primary and secondary records to point to their respective ALBs, and associate the private hosted zone with the VPC in the primary region only.
  4. D
    Create weighted routing records in a Route 53 public hosted zone with equal weights of 50 for both regions. Implement a database replication strategy where the secondary database is in a cold state and must be manually promoted before serving traffic.

Answer

Create failover routing records in a Route 53 public hosted zone, setting 'Evaluate Target Health' to Yes and associating the primary record with an application health check.
The correct configuration uses Route 53 public hosted zones with failover routing records. By setting 'Evaluate Target Health' to Yes and associating the primary record with an application health check, Route 53 can monitor the endpoint's health and failover to the secondary record when the primary endpoint is degraded.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the routing policy required for active-passive disaster recovery.
Route 53 failover routing is chosen to direct traffic to a secondary region only when the primary region is unhealthy.
Active-passive failover aligns with the goal of automatic redirecting of traffic upon failure of the primary application.
2
Evaluate the hosted zone type needed for public client traffic.
A public hosted zone is required.
Private hosted zones are only resolvable within VPCs and do not support public internet clients.
3
Determine the health monitoring mechanism for the primary endpoint.
Associate the primary record with a Route 53 health check and enable 'Evaluate Target Health'.
This allows Route 53 to actively monitor the primary ALB and trigger failover when it detects unhealthy target resources.

Key Concept

Active-Passive Disaster Recovery Failover with Route 53
Estimated Time:1m 0s
Rate this question