Multi-Region Active-Active and Active-Passive
Route traffic to multiple Regions simultaneously with Route 53 latency routing or fail over to a warm standby with health-check failover.
Why Multi-Region Architecture?
Multi-AZ protects against single AZ failures, but an entire AWS Region can become unavailable during large-scale disasters, major outages, or regulatory requirements. Multi-region architectures address this by running workloads in two or more geographically separated regions. There are two main patterns: active-passive (one region serves traffic while another waits on standby) and active-active (both regions simultaneously serve traffic).
Active-Passive: The Warm Standby Pattern
In an active-passive multi-region setup, the primary region handles all production traffic. The secondary region runs a scaled-down but functional copy that stays warm and ready. Data is replicated from primary to secondary continuously. When the primary fails, you promote the secondary to active using Route 53 failover routing. This pattern offers lower cost than active-active but has higher RTO (time to promote and scale the standby).
# Route 53 failover routing configuration
# Primary record: us-east-1 ALB (primary)
# Secondary record: us-west-2 ALB (failover)
aws route53 change-resource-record-sets \
--hosted-zone-id Z123 \
--change-batch '{
"Changes": [{
"Action": "CREATE",
"ResourceRecordSet": {
"Name": "app.example.com",
"Type": "A",
"Failover": "PRIMARY",
"HealthCheckId": "hc-primary"
}
}]
}'All lessons in this course
- HA vs Fault Tolerance: Definitions and Trade-offs
- Multi-AZ Patterns for Stateful Services
- Multi-Region Active-Active and Active-Passive
- Health Checks, Circuit Breakers, and Retry Logic