Triggering regional failover

As we discussed, in the Creating a regional health check recipe, our regional health checks assert that the fully managed, value-added cloud services that are used by the system are all up and running properly. When any of these services are down or experiencing a sufficiently high error rate, it is best to fail the entire region over to the next-best active region. This recipe demonstrates how to connect a regional health check to Route53, using CloudWatch Alarms, so that Route53 can direct traffic to healthy regions.

Getting ready

You will need a registered domain name and a Route53 Hosted Zone that you can use in this recipe to create a subdomain for the service that will be deployed, such as...