Route 53 health checks monitor the health of your endpoints and, combined with failover routing, automatically stop sending traffic to an unhealthy resource and redirect it to a healthy one.
How they power failover
A health check pings an endpoint (HTTP/HTTPS/TCP) on a schedule. Pair it with a failover routing policy: if the primary fails its check, Route 53 serves the secondary. The tell is “automatically route away from a failed endpoint” or “DNS-level failover.”
Test yourself
You want DNS to automatically route users to a standby site if the primary site stops responding. What combination achieves this?
- Simple routing only
- Route 53 health checks with a failover routing policy
- Weighted routing without health checks
- A NAT gateway
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation
Correct answer: B. Health checks detect the primary’s failure and a failover routing policy redirects traffic to the standby. Simple routing (A) has no failover; weighted without health checks (C) can’t detect failure; a NAT gateway (D) is unrelated.
Related topics
Amazon Route 53 · Route 53 routing policies · Disaster Recovery Strategies
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