Question

A financial services company runs an active-active application across two Regions (us-east-1 and eu-west-1), each fronted by an Application Load Balancer. They use Route 53 with latency-based routing and standard health checks to distribute traffic. During a recent partial outage, the application in us-east-1 was returning HTTP 200 on its health check endpoint but was silently corrupting data due to a dependency failure. Route 53 continued sending traffic there. The networking team needs a DNS-layer control that lets operators reliably and instantly shift 100% of traffic away from an unhealthy Region during an incident, independent of application-level health check status, while still supporting routine automated failover. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Implement Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) routing controls backed by readiness checks, and toggle the routing control state to fail traffic away from a Region on demand.

Answer

Shorten the Route 53 health check interval to fast (10 seconds) and lower the failure threshold to 1 so unhealthy endpoints are removed faster.

Answer

Add calculated health checks that combine the ALB health check with a CloudWatch alarm, and rely on Route 53 to withdraw the record automatically.

Answer

Replace latency-based routing with a weighted routing policy and manually set the us-east-1 record weight to 0 during incidents.