# Route 53 Routing Policies (1/2)

Route 53 includes **routing** policies that determine how it responds to client DNS queries. These policies enable you to configure different ways to route traffic based on conditions or events. There are 8 routing policies that you need to know for the Solutions Architect exam, and this post only covers the first four.

* Simple routing: directs traffic to a single resource, like a web browser. If there are multiple IP addresses associated with that resource, Route 53 will return **all** of the IP addresses, but the client will pick one at random.
    
* Weighted routing: different weights are assigned to individual resources, and Route 53 splits traffic based on the assigned proportions. For example, one EC2 instance gets 70% of the traffic, another 20% and the last one 10%.
    
* Latency-based routing: this is similar to a geographic policy, but it's actually based on how Route 53 calculates **latency** between users and AWS resources like an Elastic Load Balancer. Usually, clients will be routed to networks with the lowest latency.
    
* Failover routing: health checks must be created, and if they fail then Route 53 will stop sending traffic to the secondary/backup instances if the primary fails those checks.
    
    ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1739659650788/d631abc0-e34c-4c29-89f8-016582ee9ac6.png align="center")