Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available, reliable and cost-effective service for managing domains offered by AWS. It is a scalable Domain Name System (DNS) service named by the TCP or UDP port 53, which is where DNS server requests are addressed. Like any DNS service, Route 53 handles domain registration and routes users’ Internet requests to your application — whether it’s hosted on AWS or elsewhere.

AWS Services

Route 53 is mainly used for 3 purposes:

DNS Registration

With Amazon Route 53, you can create and manage your public DNS records. You can use Route 53 to create DNS records for a new domain or transfer DNS records for an existing domain.

Route Internet Traffic

Route 53 also answers requests to translate specific domain names into their corresponding IP addresses. The service can effectively route Internet traffic to infrastructure that uses Amazon Web Services such as Amazon EC2 instances or S3 buckets to infrastructure that don’t use Amazon Web Services.

Check Health Status

Route 53 additionally offers health checks to monitor the health and performance of your application as well as your web servers and other resources.

Benefits of using Amazon Route 53

Highly available and reliable: The DNS Failover feature can detect an outage of your website and redirect your users to other locations where your application is up and running. This increases redundancy to your website and helps maintain availability for your end users.
Flexible: Route 53 Traffic Flow allows you to route traffic based on latency, endpoint health, and geographic location. You can create traffic flow rules using the simple visual editor in the Route 53 API or Route 53 console.
Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services: you can use Route 53 with other features of Amazon Web Services. You can map domain names to your Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon EC2 instances, and other Amazon Web Services resources.
Fast: The service uses a network of DNS servers to connect users to areas with stable network conditions automatically. Consequently, the service provides low update latency for your DNS record management needs and low query latency for your users.
Cost-effective: With Route 53, you only pay for the resources you use. These include hosted zones, the number of queries the service answers for each of your domain and optional features such as health checks and traffic policies.
Secure: You can integrate Route 53 with AWS Identity and Access Management to grant permissions and credentials for any user within your AWS account.
Scalable: Amazon Route 53 come with a feature of scaling up and down depending upon the traffic.

Choosing a Routing Policy

When you create a record, you choose a routing policy, which determines how Amazon Route 53 responds to queries:

Simple routing policy– Use for a single resource that performs a given function for your domain, for example, a web server that serves content for the example.com website.
Failover routing policy– Use when you want to configure active-passive failover.
Geolocation routing policy– Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your users.
Geo-proximity routing policy– Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another.
Latency routing policy– Use when you have resources in multiple AWS Regions, and you want to route traffic to the region that provides the best latency.
Multi-value answer routing policy– Use when you want Route 53 to respond to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records selected at random.
Weighted routing policy– Use to route traffic to multiple resources in proportions that you specify.