Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a very highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System(DNS) web service which is specifically designed to provide developers and business owners a very reliable and cost-efficient way to route end users to the Web Applications.

Amazon Route 53 performs three main functions:

1. Domain registration
2. DNS service
3. Health checking

Domain Registration: Amazon Route 53 lets us register domain names, such as ‘www.example.com’.

DNS Service: Amazon Route 53 translates the domain names like above into IP addresses like ‘192.0.2.1’. It responds to DNS queries using a global network of authorative DNS servers which helps in reducing latency.

Health Checking: Amazon Route 53 sends requests automatically over internet to our application to verify if it is reachable, available, and functional.

Routing Policies

Routing Policies available on Amazon Route 53 are as follows:

1. Simple Routing — If we choose the simple routing policy we can only have one record with multiple IP addresses. If we specify multiple values in a record, Route 53 returns all values to the user in a random order.
2. Weighted Routing — It allows us to split our traffic based on different weights assigned. For example, we can set 10% of our traffic to go to US-EAST-1 and 90% to go to EU-WEST-1.
3. Latency-based Routing — It allows us to route our trafffic based on the lowest network latency for our end-user i.e. which region will provide them the fastest response time.
4. Failover Routing — It is used when we want to create an active/passive setup. For example, we may want our primary site to be in EU-WEST-2 and our secondary DR Site in AP-SOUTHEAST-2.
5. Geolocation Routing — It lets us choose where our traffic will be sent based on the geographic locations of our users i.e. the location from which the DNS queries originate.
6. Geoproximity Routing(Traffic Flow Only) — It lets Amazon Route 53 route traffic to our resources based on the geographic location of our users and our resources.
7. Multivalue Answer Routing — It lets us configure Amazon Route 53 to return multiple values, such as IP addresses for our web servers, in response to DNS queries.

Benefits of using Amazon Route 53

1. Highly available and reliable
2. Flexible
3. Designed to use with other Amazon Web Services
4. Simple
5. Fast
6. Cost-effective
7. Secure
8. Scalable
9. Simplify the hybrid cloud

Companies using Amazon Route 53

1. Airbnb
2. Pinterest
3. Amazon
4. Instacart
5. Reddit
6. medium.com