AWS Route 53 – The Efficient DNS Solution

Nowadays, a lot of data is being generated and consumed, resulting in a huge amount of internet traffic exponentially across the globe. So it is very important to manage the traffic and serve users or customers better and more efficiently. Also, businesses and other organizations that run machines in the cloud using AWS need an AWS DNS solution to correctly translate user requests into IP addresses while adapting to cloud changes and quickly generating them for DNS clients. Hence, through AWS Route 53, Amazon serves its customers better by managing the domains and routing Internet traffic. AWS Route 53 is Amazon’s official DNS solution to manage and maintain domains, and thereby it helps in boosting business reliably and cost-effectively.

AWS Route 53 or Amazon Route 53 is a reliable and cost-effective Domain Name Web Service. It provides a distributed DNS service where a domain name system translates human-readable domain names, such as www.amazon.com, to a machine-readable IP address, such as 192.0.2.44. It can route users’ Internet requests to any application — whether it’s hosted on AWS or elsewhere. Amazon Route 53 can be used either to configure DNS health checks to route traffic to healthy endpoints or to monitor the health of your application and its endpoints independently. It is an Authoritative DNS service that stores the most recent and accurate DNS records for a domain and contains information about mapping IP addresses to domain names. Amazon Route 53 can connect the request of users to other AWS services such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, or Elastic Load Balancing load balancers.

AWS Route 53 takes its name from TCP or UDP port 53, where DNS server requests are addressed. The term ‘Route’ is basically for routing traffic to Amazon DNS.

• DNS Management:
  With Amazon Route 53, users can create and manage public DNS records. Route 53 supports end-to-end DNS resolution over IPv6. Recursive DNS resolvers on IPv6 networks can use IPv4 or IPv6 transport to send DNS queries to Amazon Route 53. Also, Route 53 helps create DNS records for a new domain or transfer DNS records for an existing domain.

• Monitoring:
  Route 53 can monitor the health and performance of users’ resources or applications and send traffic accordingly through healthy resources only. Health check generates CloudWatch metrics that trigger AWS Lambda functions to perform appropriate corrective actions.

• Traffic Management:
  Through Route 53 Traffic Flow service, users can easily manage traffic globally through various routine types such as Latency Based Routing, Weighted Round Robin, Geo DNS, etc. Also, if the user has any existing domain in another platform, it is possible to switch the same domain into route 53, routing the traffic for the user’s domains.

 

Routing Policies	Definition	Use Case	Key Feature
Simple routing policy	Most basic routing types are where a record can be associated with one or more IP addresses.	Record creation in a private hosted zone	It can contain multiple values, but it returns only one resource.
Weighted routing policy	Route traffic to multiple resources in specified proportions when the traffic must be split between the resources based on some mentioned weights.	New deployments or releases testing new versions	Users can reply to a single DNS query with different IP addresses
Latency routing policy	If the user has resources in multiple AWS regions, the latency routing policy routes traffic to the region that provides the best latency.	Record creation in a private hosted zone	Works according to the latency measurements performed over a period of time, and the changes are reflected in measurements.
Failover routing policy	Defines a record to be primary and a different record to be secondary. The failover routing policy sends all traffic to the server set as primary as long as that server is healthy. If health checks determine it’s failing, traffic will be diverted to a designated secondary or backup resource.	Used if resources have to be available for the majority of the time	Applicable only for Public hosted zones.

• AWS service integration
  AWS Route 53 can be integrated with other AWS services such as Cloud Front, ELB, S3, etc. ELB integration helps in better load balancing. Other benefits associated with integration are routing traffic easily to static websites hosted on S3 and generating custom domains for Cloud Front URLs.

• Scalable
  Route 53 automatically handles large volume queries without the user’s interaction.

• Geographical DNS
  It helps the user to balance the load across different endpoints based on the geographic location of end users from which the request originates.

• Secure
  Through Integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), there is complete control over every user within the AWS account by granting them unique credentials and permissions.

Route 53 is designed for various businesses and developers to give them a flexible, cost-effective, and secure way of routing. Domain registration and creation are much simplified with AWS Route 53. Also, DNS settings for domains are automatically configured by this service.

• AWS Route 53 is a reliable and cost-effective Domain Name Web Service.
• It handles domain registration and provides worldwide distributed DNS service.
• Route 53 helps to route traffic based on multiple criteria, such as endpoint health, geographic location, and latency.
• Main functions include DNS management, Monitoring, and Traffic management.
• Routing policies decide how Route 53 responds to queries.

• Different routing policies associated with Route 53 include simple routing policy, weighted routing policy, latency routing policy, failover routing policy, etc.
• AWS Route 53 can be integrated with other AWS services such as Cloud Front, ELB and S3

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