Question #1102
A company's dynamic website is hosted on-premises in the United States. The company is expanding operations to Asia and wants to reduce latency for users in the new region. The backend systems must remain in the United States, and the solution must be implemented immediately to meet the launch deadline.
What should the solutions architect recommend?
Deploy an Amazon EC2 instance in ap-southeast-1 and migrate the site backend to it.
Host the website on Amazon S3 and configure Cross-Region Replication to ap-southeast-1.
Implement Amazon CloudFront with a custom origin configured to the on-premises servers.
Configure an Amazon Route 53 geoproximity routing policy directed at the on-premises servers.
Explanation
Option C is correct because Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that caches static assets (e.g., images, scripts) and optimizes dynamic content delivery via edge locations. By configuring CloudFront with a custom origin pointing to the on-premises servers, users in Asia are routed to the nearest edge location, reducing latency without moving the backend.
Other options fail because:
- A: Migrating the backend to EC2 violates the requirement to keep backend systems in the US.
- B: S3 is unsuitable for dynamic websites and Cross-Region Replication only replicates static content.
- D: Route 53 geoproximity routing alone does not reduce latency for a single on-premises origin in the US.
Key Points:
1. CloudFront optimizes latency for global users without backend migration.
2. Dynamic websites require origin servers (on-premises here) for processing.
3. CDNs like CloudFront cache content at edge locations for faster access.
Answer
The correct answer is: C