Route 53 is Amazon’s DNS service — it turns domain names into IP addresses — but it does more: domain registration, health checks, and several routing policies that decide where traffic goes.
The routing policies to know
Simple — one destination. Weighted — split traffic by percentage. Latency-based — send users to the fastest-responding Region. Failover — route to a backup if the primary fails a health check. Geolocation — route by user location.
Test yourself
You run identical apps in two Regions and want users automatically sent to whichever gives them the lowest lag. Which routing policy?
- Simple routing
- Weighted routing
- Latency-based routing
- Geolocation routing
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Latency-based routing directs each user to the Region with the lowest latency for them. Weighted (B) just splits by percentage; geolocation (D) routes by physical location, which isn’t the same as latency.
Related topics
Amazon CloudFront · Elastic Load Balancing · Amazon VPC
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