Route 53 Typical Exam Questions. AWS Solutions Architect Associate Complete Course

Chapter 11: Route 53 AWS Solutions Architect Exam Questions

As we saw in the previous chapter, AWS Route 53 is an excellent service that allows us to do many things, especially when combined with other services such as CloudFront, Elastic Load Balancers… Let’s look at the typical questions in the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam!

Route 53 for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification.

Remember that all the chapters from the course can be found in the following link.

SOLUTIONS

A multi-tier web application currently hosts two web services on the same set of instances, listening for traffic on different ports. Which AWS service should we use to route traffic to the service based on the incoming request path?

1. Amazon Route 53
2. Amazon CloudFront
3. Application Load Balancer (ALB)
4. Classic Load Balancer (CLB)

Solution: 3. The Application Load Balancer operates at the request level (Layer 7), making it suitable for routing traffic based on application content, such as HTTP headers and the URL in the request, and distributing traffic across multiple targets or instances.

The Classic Load Balancer operates at both the request level (Layer 7) and connection level (Layer 4), but it does not support path-based routing like the Application Load Balancer.

You can see an example of this behavior in the following image:

Application Load Balancer redirecting based on the incoming request path.

A static website must use the zone apex of a DNS domain (e.g., fullcertified.com). How should we implement a scalable and cost-effective solution using the Amazon Route 53 service? (Select TWO)

1. Create a Route 53 hosted zone, and set the NS records of the domain to use Route 53 name servers.
2. Host the website on an Amazon EC2 instance, and map a Route 53 Alias record to the public IP address of the EC2 instance.
3. Host the website using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and map a Route 53 Alias record to this environment.
4. Host the website on an Amazon EC2 instance with ELB and Auto Scaling, and map a Route 53 Alias record to the ELB endpoint.
5. Serve the website from an Amazon S3 bucket, and map a Route 53 Alias record to the website endpoint.

Solution: 1, 5. Creating a hosted zone in Amazon Route 53 allows you to manage your domain’s DNS records. As this page is static, you can host it in an S3 bucket, as it’s the most cost-effective solution; you don’t even need to manage servers. You can map the domain’s zone apex (example.com) to the S3 bucket using an Alias record in Route 53. The other options won’t be as cost-effective or scalable for serving a static website as they involve running server instances.

You can see how Amazon Route 53 works (although routing to EC2 instances) in the following image:

How Amazon Route 53 works.

A web application will run on Amazon EC2 instances behind Elastic Load Balancers in multiple regions in an active/passive configuration. The website address the application runs on is “fullcertified.com”, and we need to use AWS Route 53 to perform the DNS resolution for the application. How should we configure AWS Route 53 in this scenario? (Select TWO)

1. Use a Failover Routing Policy
2. Set Evaluate Target Health to “No” for the primary
3. Use a Weighted Routing Policy
4. Connect the ELBs using Alias records
5. Connect the ELBs using CNAME records

Solution: 1, 4. A Failover Routing Policy is used for active/passive configurations. You set up DNS failover so that Route 53 will route your traffic from an unhealthy resource to a healthy one. It means that a primary resource or group of resources is available most of the time, and you want a secondary resource or group of resources to be on standby in case all the primary resources become unavailable, as you can see in the following image:

Failover Routing Policy.

A web application should run both on-premise and in AWS for some time. During the period of co-existence, the client would like 80% of the traffic to hit the AWS-based web servers and 20% to be directed to the on-premises web servers. How can we distribute traffic as requested?

1. Use Route 53 with a weighted routing policy and configure the respective weights.
2. Use Route 53 with a simple routing policy
3. Use an Application Load Balancer to distribute traffic based on IP address
4. Use a Network Load Balancer to distribute traffic based on the Instance ID

Solution: 1. Amazon Route 53 is a scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It provides routing policies such as simple, failover, geolocation, geoproximity, latency, and weighted.

The weighted routing policy lets you split your traffic based on different weights assigned. In this scenario, you can assign a weight of 80 to the AWS-based web servers and 20 to the on-premises web servers. You can see this routing policy in the following image:

Weighted Routing Policy.

A website with dynamic and static content runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Customers around the world are reporting performance issues with the website. How can we improve the website performance for users worldwide?

1. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution and configure the ALB as an origin. Then update the Amazon Route 53 record to point to the CloudFront distribution.
2. Create a latency-based Amazon Route 53 record for the ALB. Then launch new EC2 instances with larger instance sizes and register the instances with the ALB.
3. Launch new EC2 instances hosting the same web application in different Regions closer to the users. Use Auto Scaling Groups to connect customers to the closest region.
4. Migrate the website to an Amazon S3 bucket in the Regions closest to the users. Then create an Amazon Route 53 geolocation record to point to the S3 buckets.

Solution: 1. Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds. CloudFront can use Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon EC2, etc., as origins for your applications. Configuring CloudFront to have the ALB as the origin server can cache static content closer to the users, reducing latency. By updating the Route53 record to point to CloudFront, users’ requests are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

We need to discard the option to host the website in Amazon S3, as it’s only used to serve static content. The other options will add a lot of complexity while keeping the instances synced. So using CloudFront with the ALB as the origin is the correct option, as you can see in the following diagram:

The solution to this AWS Solutions Architect Associate question

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