Route 53 Health Checks for Weighted Records
A company uses Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing across multiple AWS Regions to provide resiliency. The company uses Route 53 with latency-based routing to direct traffic to the nearest Region. Within each Region, weighted A records distribute traffic across multiple Availability Zones. During a recent update, some Availability Zone endpoints became unhealthy. Route 53 continued to route traffic to the unhealthy endpoints. The company must prevent this issue from occurring in the future. Which solution will meet this requirement?
Community Insight
Tests the critical requirement that Route 53 does not automatically detect endpoint health for standard records; you must explicitly associate health checks with DNS records to remove unhealthy targets.
Learn why Route 53 continues routing traffic to unhealthy endpoints when health checks are missing and how to implement them for weighted records to ensure resiliency.
Candidates often choose reducing TTL or changing weights, failing to realize these only affect caching or distribution ratios but do not prevent traffic from being sent to failed endpoints.
Community Discussion (3 comments)
Comments & Corrections
No comments yet — spotted an error or have a note? Share it below.
Expert Analysis
Why the Answer Is Correct
Route 53 does not automatically evaluate the health of non-alias DNS records. To prevent traffic from being routed to unhealthy Availability Zone endpoints, you must create a Route 53 health check for each endpoint and associate it with the corresponding weighted record. When the health check fails, Route 53 automatically stops including that record in DNS responses, effectively removing the unhealthy endpoint.Why the Other Options Are Wrong
Option B (increasing weight) merely changes the proportion of traffic directed to healthy zones but does not stop traffic from going to unhealthy ones if they are still registered. Option C (reconfiguring to latency-based) ignores the immediate need for health monitoring and doesn't solve the underlying lack of health detection. Option D (reducing TTL) speeds up DNS cache expiration but does not trigger Route 53 to stop sending traffic to a known bad endpoint during an active failure.Community Comment Notes
Community consensus strongly supports Option A, with users noting that 'Route 53 does not automatically determine the health of ordinary non-alias records' and emphasizing that associating health checks is the standard solution for this scenario.Exam Strategy
Always look for explicit health check associations when Route 53 routing issues involve unhealthy endpoints. Remember that Alias records can have 'Evaluate Target Health' enabled, but standard records require manual health check association.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why doesn't Route 53 auto-detect unhealthy endpoints?
Route 53 only evaluates health automatically for Alias records with 'Evaluate Target Health' set to Yes. Standard records require explicit health check association.
Can I use TTL reduction to fix unhealthy endpoint routing?
No. Reducing TTL only affects how quickly clients refresh cached DNS records. It does not make Route 53 aware of endpoint failures or exclude them from responses.
Related Analysis
Practice All SOA-C03 Questions
Access 100 questions with complete answers and detailed explanations.
View Full SOA-C03 Practice Test →