AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 768

A new website will run on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Amazon Route 53 will be used to manage DNS records.
What type of record should be set in Route 53 to point the website's apex domain name (for example, `company.com`) to the Application Load Balancer?

Answer options

• A. CNAME
• B. SOA
• C. TXT
• D. ALIAS

Correct answer: D

Explanation

To resolve a zone apex (root domain) to an AWS resource such as an Application Load Balancer, an ALIAS record must be used because standard DNS specifications do not permit CNAME records at the zone apex level. ALIAS records are Route 53-specific virtual records that dynamically resolve to the target resource's IP addresses. Other options like SOA and TXT records are used for zone authority information and descriptive text, respectively, and cannot be used for routing traffic to a load balancer.