AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 547

A company wants to direct its users to a backup static error page if the company's primary website is unavailable. The primary website's DNS records are hosted in Amazon Route 53. The domain is pointing to an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The company needs a solution that minimizes changes and infrastructure overhead.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Update the Route 53 records to use a latency routing policy. Add a static error page that is hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket to the records so that the traffic is sent to the most responsive endpoints.
• B. Set up a Route 53 active-passive failover configuration. Direct traffic to a static error page that is hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket when Route 53 health checks determine that the ALB endpoint is unhealthy.
• C. Set up a Route 53 active-active configuration with the ALB and an Amazon EC2 instance that hosts a static error page as endpoints. Configure Route 53 to send requests to the instance only if the health checks fail for the ALB.
• D. Update the Route 53 records to use a multivalue answer routing policy. Create a health check. Direct traffic to the website if the health check passes. Direct traffic to a static error page that is hosted in Amazon S3 if the health check does not pass.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

An active-passive failover configuration in Amazon Route 53 is the standard way to redirect traffic to a backup site, such as a static error page in an Amazon S3 bucket, when the primary resource (ALB) fails health checks. Other routing policies, like latency or multivalue answer, do not support this specific failover behavior and would still send some traffic to unhealthy endpoints. Hosting the backup on Amazon S3 offers lower infrastructure overhead compared to deploying an Amazon EC2 instance.