Question 142 - DOP-C02 discussion

To implement failover for the application to the secondary Region so that HTTP GET requests meet the desired RTO, the DevOps engineer should use the following solution:

Create a new origin on the distribution for the secondary ALB. A CloudFront origin is the source of the content that CloudFront delivers to viewers.By creating a new origin for the secondary ALB, the DevOps engineer can configure CloudFront to route traffic to the secondary Region when the primary Region is unavailable1

Create a new origin group. Set the original ALB as the primary origin. Configure the origin group to fail over for HTTP 5xx status codes. An origin group is a logical grouping of two origins: a primary origin and a secondary origin. By creating an origin group, the DevOps engineer can specify which origin CloudFront should use as a fallback when the primary origin fails. The DevOps engineer can also define which HTTP status codes should trigger a failover from the primary origin to the secondary origin.By setting the original ALB as the primary origin and configuring the origin group to fail over for HTTP 5xx status codes, the DevOps engineer can ensure that CloudFront will switch to the secondary ALB when the primary ALB returns server errors2

Update the default behavior to use the origin group. A behavior is a set of rules that CloudFront applies when it receives requests for specific URLs or file types. The default behavior applies to all requests that do not match any other behaviors.By updating the default behavior to use the origin group, the DevOps engineer can enable failover routing for all requests that are sent to the distribution3

This solution will meet the requirements because it will automate the failover of the application to the secondary Region with zero-second RTO. When CloudFront receives an HTTP GET request, it will first try to route it to the primary ALB in the primary Region. If the primary ALB is healthy and returns a successful response, CloudFront will deliver it to the viewer. If the primary ALB is unhealthy or returns an HTTP 5xx status code, CloudFront will automatically route the request to the secondary ALB in the secondary Region and deliver its response to the viewer.

The other options are not correct because they either do not provide zero-second RTO or do not work as expected. Creating a second CloudFront distribution that has the secondary ALB as the default origin and creating Amazon Route 53 alias records that have a failover policy is not a good option because it will introduce additional latency and complexity to the solution. Route 53 health checks and DNS propagation can take several minutes or longer, which means that viewers might experience delays or errors when accessing the application during a failover event. Creating Amazon Route 53 alias records that have a failover policy and Evaluate Target Health set to Yes for both ALBs and setting the TTL of both records to O is not a valid option because it will not work with CloudFront distributions. Route 53 does not support health checks for alias records that point to CloudFront distributions, so it cannot detect if an ALB behind a distribution is healthy or not. Creating a CloudFront function that detects HTTP 5xx status codes and returns a 307 Temporary Redirect error response to the secondary ALB is not a valid option because it will not provide zero-second RTO. A 307 Temporary Redirect error response tells viewers to retry their requests with a different URL, which means that viewers will have to make an additional request and wait for another response from CloudFront before reaching the secondary ALB.

References:

1: Adding, Editing, and Deleting Origins - Amazon CloudFront

2: Configuring Origin Failover - Amazon CloudFront

3: Creating or Updating a Cache Behavior - Amazon CloudFront