How to Distribute Multi-Region Website Traffic with Health Checks?

SAA-C03 By islever Editorial Last updated

Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures. Determine high-performing and/or scalable network architectures.

Short answer

B Use an Amazon Route 53 multivalue answer routing policy with health checks to return only healthy website endpoints across both Regions.

Question

A company serves its website by using an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances in a single AWS Region. The website does not require a database. The company is expanding, and the company's engineering team deploys the website to a second Region. The company wants to distribute traffic across both Regions to accommodate growth and for disaster recovery purposes. The solution should not serve traffic from a Region in which the website is unhealthy. Which policy or resource should the company use to meet these requirements?
  1. An Amazon Route 53 simple routing policy
  2. An Amazon Route 53 multivalue answer routing policy Correct Answer
  3. An Application Load Balancer in one Region with a target group that specifies the EC2 instance IDs from both Regions
  4. An Application Load Balancer in one Region with a target group that specifies the IP addresses of the EC2 instances from both Regions

Key Takeaways

It tests multi-Region DNS failover with per-endpoint health checks, and the trap is choosing a single-Region Application Load Balancer that cannot target another Region.

This SAA-C03 question tests Route 53 routing policies for multi-Region website traffic with health checks. The answer is B: multivalue answer routing returns only healthy endpoints across both Regions.

Common mistake: Many candidates choose D, an ALB with IP targets from both Regions, but a single ALB and its target group are Regional and cannot route to targets in a different Region.

Expert Analysis

Why the Answer Is Correct

A Route 53 multivalue answer routing policy lets you associate multiple records with the same name, such as the public IP addresses or DNS names of the website endpoints in both Regions. Each record can have a health check, and Route 53 returns only the values for healthy resources in response to DNS queries. This directly satisfies the need to distribute traffic across both Regions for growth and disaster recovery while avoiding a Region where the website is unhealthy. The policy does not require a database and works at the DNS layer, so it fits the single-Region Auto Scaling group deployment that is expanded to a second Region.

Why the Other Options Are Wrong

A simple routing policy (A) supports only one record and cannot return multiple endpoints or perform health checks, so it cannot exclude an unhealthy Region. Option C and Option D both rely on a single Application Load Balancer in one Region; an ALB is a Regional resource, and its target group cannot include EC2 instance IDs or IP addresses from a different Region. Even with IP targets, the ALB would still be a single-Region entry point and would not distribute traffic directly across both Regions as required. Therefore B is the only listed policy that provides multi-Region distribution with health-based exclusion.

Community Comment Notes

waldirlsantos writes that "53 with multivalue is the best option for this case" and quotes AWS documentation about returning only healthy resources. Kaula shared the official AWS multivalue routing documentation link. mk168898 notes that C and D are wrong because the solution must serve traffic across both Regions, and MatAlves adds that A does not provide health checks while C and D only work within a single Region. Sergiuss95 and TruthWS also confirm option B.

Official Reference

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-policy-multivalue.html

This link opens the official vendor documentation in a new tab.

Exam Strategy

Check the scope of each AWS resource before choosing: Route 53 routing policies are global and DNS-based, while an ALB is confined to one Region and one VPC. When a scenario asks for multi-Region traffic distribution with health checks, eliminate any option that places all targets behind a single Regional load balancer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why can't an Application Load Balancer target group include EC2 instances from both Regions?

An ALB is a Regional resource, and its target group must contain targets in the same Region; it cannot route to instances or IPs in another Region for this multi-Region requirement.

How does a Route 53 multivalue answer routing policy handle an unhealthy Region?

It associates health checks with each record and returns only the values for healthy resources, so traffic is not sent to the Region whose website is unhealthy.

More SAA-C03 FAQ →

Community Votes

B
100%

100% of anonymous learners picked answer B. Votes are pick records left by other test-takers — they are not the verified answer.

Discussion 6 contributions

Compiled from public community threads and reader submissions, lightly edited for clarity. Handles and vote tallies are shown as recorded, and comments reflect the views of individual contributors.

From public community threads 6

  1. waldirlsantos 👍 5 Answered B
    53 with multivalue is the best option for this case Multivalue answer routing lets you configure Amazon Route 53 to return multiple values, such as IP addresses for your web servers, in response to DNS queries. You can specify multiple values for almost any record, but multivalue answer routing also lets you check the health of each resource, so Route 53 returns only values for healthy resources. It's not a substitute for a load balancer, but the ability to return multiple health-checkable IP addresses is a way to use DNS to improve availability and load balancing.
  2. Kaula 👍 3 Answered B
    https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-policy-multivalue.html
  3. mk168898 👍 2 Answered B
    C and D are wrong because need serve traffic across both region. B seems correct
  4. MatAlves 👍 1
    A - Doesn't provide health check C and D - Only work within a single zone.
  5. Sergiuss95 👍 1 Answered B
    Yes, is the option b.
Show 1 more comment
  1. TruthWS 👍 1
    Option B

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