Which AWS service can be used to check application endpoints and direct traffic to healthy regional endpoints?

Amazon Route 53 is the correct choice for checking application endpoints and directing traffic to healthy regional endpoints. This service acts as a scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service that can route users to various endpoints based on health checks, policies, and configurations.

Route 53 performs health checks by continuously monitoring the status of application endpoints. If it detects that an endpoint is unhealthy, it can automatically redirect traffic to other healthy endpoints, ensuring high availability of applications. This feature is crucial for improving the reliability of web applications and providing an optimal user experience.

Other services mentioned, while they have unique functionalities, do not specifically provide the DNS-level and health-check capabilities that Route 53 offers. Elastic Load Balancing primarily distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, but it typically operates within a single region rather than managing DNS routing across multiple regions. AWS CloudFront is a content delivery network that caches content closer to users for faster access but is not designed for health checks or endpoint management. AWS Auto Scaling adjusts the number of computing resources dynamically based on demand but does not handle traffic direction and health monitoring of application endpoints.