I am trying to find out if it is possible configure Route53 to do the following:
1) Route traffic to a primary stack in one AWS region
2) If the primary stack has an outage, reroute traffic to the stack in the secondary region (the secondary absolutely cannot be used unless the primary has an outage)
3) If the secondary region has an outage, reroute traffic to a "failwhale" page in an S3 bucket
Is this at all possible to do with Route53 or even DYNect? I've been searching all over the place, reading AWS documents, etc but find them to not be of use to me.
AWS does implement DNS failover, including Active-Passive options, and they even mention an Active-Active-Passive example. It looks like what you want would be called Active-Passive-Passive. Maybe they support that.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-failover.html