To fail over traffic to application replicas in multiple AWS Regions, you can use routing controls in Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) that are integrated with a specific kind of health check in Amazon Route 53. Routing controls are simple on-off switches that enable you to switch your client traffic from one Regional replica to another. The traffic rerouting is accomplished by routing control health checks that are set up with Amazon Route 53 DNS records. For example, DNS failover records, associated with domain names that front your application replicas in each Region.
This section explains how routing control works, how to set up routing control components, and how to use them to reroute traffic for failover.
The routing control components in ARC are: clusters, control panels, routing controls, and routing control health checks. All routing controls are grouped on control panels. You can group them on the default control panel that ARC creates for your cluster, or create your own custom control panels. You must create a cluster before you can create a control panel or a routing control. Each cluster in ARC is a data plane of endpoints in five AWS Regions.
After you create routing controls and routing control health checks, you can create safety rules for routing control to help prevent unintentional recovery automation side effects. You can update routing control states to reroute traffic, individually or in batches, by using the AWS CLI or API actions (recommended), or by using the AWS Management Console.
This section explains how routing controls work, and how to create and use them to reroute traffic for your application.
Important
To learn about preparing to use ARC to reroute traffic as part of a failover plan for your application in a disaster scenario, see Best practices for routing control in ARC.
