SAA-C03 Practice set 5, #42

[roychen]

Hi,

Question is

42. Question

A client is hosting their company website on a cluster of web servers that are behind a public-facing Application Load Balancer (AWS ALB). The client also uses Amazon Route 53 to manage their public DNS.

How should the client configure the DNS zone apex record to point to the load balancer?

1. Create an A record aliased to the load balancer DNS name.

2. Create a CNAME record pointing to the load balancer DNS name.

3. Create an A record pointing to the IP address of the load balancer.

4. Create an alias for CNAME record to the load balancer DNS name.

Answer said to be #1 Create an A record aliased…

But an alias can’t be an A record? Should it be #2 CNAME to load balancer?

[Irene-TutorialsDojo]

Hi roychen! 👋

Great question!

While it may seem counterintuitive, a Route 53 Alias A record is indeed valid and is actually AWS’s recommended approach for this scenario.

Route 53 Alias records are a Route 53-specific feature that works differently from standard DNS — internally, Route 53 resolves the ALB’s DNS name to its current IP addresses and serves them as a standard A record to the client, making it behave like an A record externally.

As for using a CNAME, the AWS documentation explicitly states that CNAME records cannot be created at the zone apex (e.g., tutorialsdojo.com), which is why the Alias A record is the correct and only viable solution here.

So, the answer remains Option 1: Create an A record aliased to the load balancer DNS name.

Hope that clears things up, and happy studying! 😊

Cheers,

Irene @ Tutorials Dojo