AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 713

A company has a web application hosted over 10 Amazon EC2 instances with traffic directed by Amazon Route 53. The company occasionally experiences a timeout error when attempting to browse the application. The networking team finds that some DNS queries return IP addresses of unhealthy instances, resulting in the timeout error.
What should a solutions architect implement to overcome these timeout errors?

Answer options

• A. Create a Route 53 simple routing policy record for each EC2 instance. Associate a health check with each record.
• B. Create a Route 53 failover routing policy record for each EC2 instance. Associate a health check with each record.
• C. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with EC2 instances as its origin. Associate a health check with the EC2 instances.
• D. Create an Application Load Balancer (ALB) with a health check in front of the EC2 instances. Route to the ALB from Route 53.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Deploying an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of the EC2 instances is the standard AWS best practice, as the ALB automatically conducts health checks and routes traffic only to healthy targets. Route 53 can then resolve to the single ALB endpoint rather than individual instance IPs, preventing timeouts. Other options like Route 53 simple routing do not support health checks, while failover routing is intended for active-passive disaster recovery rather than active-active load balancing.