A company wants users routed to the nearest AWS Region by measured latency to minimize response time, while also failing over automatically to a healthy Region if the primary becomes unavailable. Which Route 53 routing policy combination achieves this?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: A
Latency-based routing answers each user's DNS query with the Region endpoint that the internet measurements say is fastest from that user's location, which directly delivers the nearest-Region goal. When those records carry health checks, Route 53 stops returning unhealthy endpoints and serves the next-best healthy Region automatically.
The same setup therefore covers both performance routing and Regional failover without scripts or manual intervention.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Geolocation routing picks a Region based on the user's mapped geography, which can point at a far or congested Region and does not adapt to actual measured latency.
- C. Weighted routing splits traffic by configured percentages regardless of where users are or how each Region performs, so a fixed share of users would keep using a slow or failed Region.
- D. Simple routing returns all configured records without selecting for latency or health, so there is neither nearest-Region optimization nor automatic failover behavior.