Route53

Highly available and scalable cloud DNS. Register and manage domains, create DNS routing rules, e.g. failovers.

Route53 is a DNS service like NameCheap with more synergies with AWS Services

You can:

  • register and manage domains
  • create various record sets on a domain
  • Implement complex traffic flows e.g. Blue/green deploy, failovers.
  • Continusouly mointor records via health checks
  • resolve VPCs outside of AWS

Route53 - Use Case

Use Route53 to get your custom domains to point yo your AWS Resources

  1. Incoming internet traffic
  2. Route traffic to our web-app backed by available
  3. Route traffic to an instance we use to tweak our AMI (Amazon Machine Images)
  4. Route traffic to API Gateway which powers our API
  5. Route traffic to CloudFront which serves our S3 static hosted website
  6. Route traffic to an Elastic IP (EIP) which is a static IP that hosts our company Minecraft server

Record Sets

We create record sets which allows us to point our naked domain (exampro.co) and subdomains via Domain records;

For example we can send our www subdomain using a A record to point to a specific IP address.

Routing Policies

There are 7 different types of Routing Policies available inside Route53

  • Simple Routing - default routing policy, multiple addresses result in random selection
  • Weighted Routing - route traffic based on weighted values to split traffic
  • Latency-Based Routing - route traffic to region resource with lowest latency
  • Geolocation Routing - route traffic based on the location of your users
  • Geo-proximity routing - route traffic based on the location of your resources and optionally shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another
  • Multi-value Answer Routing - respond to DNS queries with up to eight health records

Traffic Flow

A visual editor lets you create sophisticated routing configurations for your resources using existing routing types.

Simple Routing Policies

Simple Routing Policies are the most basic routing policies in Route53 Default Policy

  • You have 1 record and provide multiple IP addresses
  • When multiple values are specified for a record, Route53 will return all values back to the user in random order

Weighted Routing Policies

Let you split up traffic based on different weights assigned.

This allows you to send a certain percentage of overall traffic to one server, and have any other traffic apart from that directed to a completely different server.

For example if you had an ALB running experimental features you could test against a small a mount of traffic at random to minimize the impact of the affect

Latency based Routing Policies

Allows you to direct traffic based on the lowest network latencypossible for your end-user based on region.

Requires a latency resource record to be set for the EC2 or ELB resource that hosts your application in each region

For example,You have two copies of your webapp backed by ALB. One in California, and another in Montreal. A request comes in form Toronto, it will be routed to Montreal since it will have lower latency

Failover Routing Policies

Allow you to create active/passive setups in situations where you want a primary site in one location, and secondary date site in another

Route53 automatically monitors health-checks from your primary site to determine the health of end-points. If an endpoint is determined to be in a failed state, all traffic is automatically directed to the secondary location.

For example, we have a primary and secondary webapp backed by ALB. Route53 determines our primary is unhealthy and fails over to secondary ALB.

Geolation Routing Policies

Allows you to direct traffic based on the geographic location of where the request originated.

For example this would let you route all traffic coming from North America to servers located therem where queries from other regions could be directed to servers hosted in that region.

Geoproximity Routing Policies

Allows you to direct traffic based on the geographic locatin of your users, and your AWS resources.

You can route more or less traffic to a specific resource by specifying a ‘Bias’ value.

Bias values expand or shrink the size of the geographic region from which traffic is routed. You must use Route53 Traffic Flow in order to use geoproximity routing policies.

Multi-Value Answer Policies

Multi-Value Answer Policies let you configure Route53 to return multiple values such as IP addresses for your web-servers, in response to DNS queries.

Multiple values can be specified for almost any record. Route53 automatically performas health-checks on resources and only returns values of ones deemed healthy.

Similar to Simple Routing, however with an added health check for your record set resources.

Health Checks

  • Checks health every 30s by default. Can be reduced to every 10s
  • A health check can initialize a failover if that status is returned unhealthy
  • A CloudWatch Alarm can be created to alert you of status unhealthy
  • A health check can monitor other health checks to create a chain of reactions

Route53 - Resolver

(Formerly known as .2 resolver)

A regional service that lets you route DNS queries between your VPCs and your network

DNS Resolution for Hybrid Environments (On-Premise and Cloud)

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