Amazon Route 53 is AWS's highly available, scalable, and fully managed DNS service and domain registrar. This post covers how Route 53 works, its key features including hosted zones, routing policies, and health checks, and why it's a critical component for building resilient cloud applications.
Route 53
- A highly available, scalable, fully managed and Authoritative DNS
- Authoritative = the customer (you) can update the DNS records
- Route 53 is also a Domain Register
- Ability to check the health of your recourses
- The only AWS service which provides 100% availability SLA
- Why Route 53? 53 is a reference to the traditional DNS port
Route 53 - Record Types
- A -maps a hostname to IPv4
- AAAA - maps a hostname to IPV6
- CNAME - maps a hostname to another hostname
- The target is a domain name which must have an A or AAAA record
- Can’t create a CNAME record for the top node of a DNS namespace (Zone Apex)
- Example: you can’t create for example.com, but you can create for www.example.com
- NS -Name Server for the Hosted Zone
- Control how traffic is routed for a domain
Route 53 - Hosted Zones
- A container for records that define how to route traffic to a domain and its subdomains
- Public Hosted Zones - contains records that specify how to route traffic on the internet (public domain name) applicationI.mypublicdomain.com
- Private Hosted Zones - contains records that specify how you route traffic within one or more VPCs (private domain names) applicationI.company.com
- You pay $0.50 per month per hosted zone
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon Route 53?
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available, scalable, and fully managed DNS (Domain Name System) web service from AWS that also functions as a domain registrar, allowing you to register domain names and route traffic to AWS resources.
What routing policies does Route 53 support?
Route 53 supports multiple routing policies including Simple, Weighted, Latency-based, Failover, Geolocation, Geoproximity, and Multi-value Answer routing, each suited for different traffic management scenarios.
How do Route 53 health checks work?
Route 53 health checks monitor the health of your resources by sending requests at regular intervals and can automatically route traffic away from unhealthy endpoints to healthy ones.