Setting up DNS Failover for High Traffic - Best Practices

Ensure High Availability with DNS Failover for Static Website

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Question

There is a company website that is going to be launched in the coming weeks.

There is a probability that the traffic will be quite high in the first couple of weeks.

In the event of a load failure, how can you set up DNS failover to a static website? Choose the correct answer from the options given below.

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Answer - C.

Amazon Route 53 health checks monitor the health and performance of your web applications, web servers, and other resources.

If you have multiple resources that perform the same function, you can configure DNS failover so that Amazon Route 53 will route your traffic from an unhealthy resource to a healthy resource.

For example, if you have two web servers and one web server becomes unhealthy, Amazon Route 53 can route traffic to the other web server.

So you can route traffic to a website hosted on S3 or to a cloudfront distribution.

For more information on DNS failover using Route53, please refer to the below link:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-failover.html

In the event of a load failure on a company website that is about to be launched, DNS failover can be set up to redirect traffic to a static website. Among the given options, the correct one is C, which involves using Amazon Route 53 with the failover option to failover to a static S3 website bucket or CloudFront distribution.

Option A, which involves duplicating the exact application architecture in another region and configuring DNS weight-based routing, is a valid option. However, it may involve additional costs and requires significant effort to set up and maintain the infrastructure.

Option B, which involves enabling failover to an on-premise data center, may not be practical in this scenario. It may also lead to additional costs and complications, such as managing a separate data center.

Option D, which involves adding more servers in case the application fails, may not be effective in handling a sudden surge in traffic. Moreover, it does not provide a backup option in case of a complete failure.

Therefore, the most practical and efficient option is to use Amazon Route 53 with the failover option to failover to a static S3 website bucket or CloudFront distribution. Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS service that can automatically route traffic to healthy endpoints, and the failover option can be used to redirect traffic to a secondary endpoint in case of a failure.

By using a static S3 website bucket or CloudFront distribution as the secondary endpoint, the website can continue to serve traffic even if the primary endpoint fails. This option is cost-effective, easy to set up and maintain, and provides a reliable failover option for the website.