A site must fail over at the DNS layer to a standby region when the primary region's health check fails. Which Route 53 routing policy implements this active-passive failover?
A.Weighted routing with 100/0 weights
Weights aren't the mechanism intended for health-based failover.
B.Failover routing with primary and secondary records evaluated by health checks
Correct. Primary/secondary records + health evaluation.
C.Latency-based routing
Latency routing optimizes for lowest latency, not failover semantics.
D.Multivalue answer routing
Multivalue returns up to 8 healthy records — an active-active pattern.
Why this answer
Failover routing is explicitly designed for active-passive: Route 53 returns the primary record while its health check passes, and switches to the secondary when it fails. Weighted 100/0 achieves a similar static split but isn't health-check-driven failover by design.
Correct answer: B · Last reviewed 2026-11-02
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