A company hosts a web application on 10 Amazon EC2 instances, with traffic directed by Amazon Route 53. Users sometimes experience timeouts because DNS queries return IP addresses of unhealthy instances. What should a solutions architect implement to prevent these timeout errors?

The best solution is to use an Application Load Balancer (ALB). An ALB automatically performs health checks on the registered EC2 instances and routes traffic only to healthy instances. By directing Route 53 to the ALB, you ensure that users are always directed to a healthy application endpoint, preventing timeouts caused by unhealthy instances. Incorrect options: Simple routing policy with health checks: Route 53's simple routing policy doesn't automatically remove unhealthy endpoints from the DNS response. While it can be associated with health checks, it primarily provides information, not active traffic management. Failover routing policy with health checks: Failover routing is designed for active-passive scenarios, not for distributing traffic across multiple active, healthy instances. It would only direct traffic to a secondary resource if the primary fails. CloudFront distribution: CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that caches content and improves performance. While it can sit in front of EC2 instances, it doesn't inherently provide load balancing and health checking for the origin instances in the way an ALB does.