Exams / SAA-C03 / Global networking / Question 1
SAA-C03 practice question: Global networking
Design High-Performing Architectures A free question from our original SAA-C03 practice exam. Try it, then open the answer to see why each option is right or wrong.
A games studio runs a real-time multiplayer game that uses UDP. Game servers run behind Network Load Balancers in eu-west-2 and us-east-1. The game client ships with a fixed list of server IP addresses that cannot be changed after release. Players around the world need low, consistent latency, and if one Region fails, players must be able to reconnect to the other Region within a minute without any change to the client. Which solution meets these requirements?
Choose one answer.
- AA. Assign Elastic IP addresses to each Network Load Balancer, and use Amazon Route 53 latency-based records with health checks to return the nearest healthy Region.
- BB. Create an AWS Global Accelerator standard accelerator with a UDP listener, and use an Application Load Balancer in each Region as the endpoint.
- CC. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with an origin group that contains both Regions' Network Load Balancers, so requests fail over between the origins.
- DD. Create an AWS Global Accelerator standard accelerator with a UDP listener and an endpoint group in each Region that contains that Region's Network Load Balancer.
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: D
- A. Wrong: Network Load Balancers support UDP and can have static Elastic IP addresses, and Route 53 can steer DNS lookups by latency and health. But the client connects to fixed IP addresses rather than resolving DNS, so when a Region fails it keeps trying that Region's addresses. Global Accelerator keeps the same addresses during failover. Learn more: Latency-based routing (opens in a new tab)
- B. Wrong: Global Accelerator gives the static addresses and fast failover, but Application Load Balancers only have HTTP and HTTPS listeners, so they cannot receive the game's UDP traffic. The existing Network Load Balancers, which support UDP, should stay as the endpoints. Learn more: Listeners for your Application Load Balancers (opens in a new tab)
- C. Wrong: CloudFront speeds up content served over HTTP and can fail over between origins in an origin group, but only for HTTP GET, HEAD and OPTIONS requests. It does not carry raw UDP game traffic, and it gives no fixed IP addresses for the client to use. Learn more: Optimize high availability with CloudFront origin failover (opens in a new tab)
- D. Right: Correct. The accelerator's two static anycast IP addresses can be built into the client and never change. Traffic enters the AWS network at the nearest edge location for lower, steadier latency, and Global Accelerator moves traffic to the healthy Region's endpoint group without any DNS or client change. Learn more: What is AWS Global Accelerator? (opens in a new tab)
Explanation
The hard-coded client rules out anything that changes the address a player connects to, including DNS-based failover. Global Accelerator provides two static anycast IPv4 addresses that stay with the accelerator, carries TCP and UDP from the nearest edge location over the AWS network, and reacts to endpoint health by routing to the other Region. Its endpoints must handle UDP, so the Network Load Balancers are the right endpoints; Application Load Balancers and CloudFront only handle HTTP-based traffic.
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