What Is Amazon Route 53?

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed for developers and corporates to route the end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.mydomain.com, into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other.

 

What are the features of Route 53

• Easy to register your domain − We can purchase all level of domains like .com, .net, .org, etc. directly from Route 53.
• Highly reliable − Route 53 is built using AWS infrastructure. Its distributed nature towards DNS servers help to ensure a consistent ability to route applications of end users.
• Scalable − Route 53 is designed in such a way that it automatically handles large volume queries without the user’s interaction.
• Can be used with other AWS Services − Route 53 also works with other AWS services. It can be used to map domain names to our Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon and other AWS resources.
• Easy to use − It is easy to sign-up, easy to configure DNS settings, and provides quick response to DNS queries.
• Health Check: Route 53 monitors the health of the application. If an outage is detected, then it automatically redirects the users to a healthy resource.
• Cost-Effective − Pay only for the domain service and the number of queries that the service answers for each domain.
• Secure − By integrating Route 53 with AWS (IAM), there is complete control over every user within the AWS account, such as deciding which user can access which part of Route 53.

 

What are three services available on Route 53?

Amazon’s Route 53 provides three services:

1. record creation that stores the human-readable names you want to be associated with your web domains
2. request handling to send web traffic to the appropriate servers
3. health checks to make sure traffic isn’t being sent to servers that can’t handle it.

 

What is AWS Route 53 traffic flow?

Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow is a domain name system service that lets an Amazon Web Services customer utilize a visual interface to define how end-user traffic is routed to application endpoints via the drag-and-drop graphical user interface to ease traffic management.

Five types of rules are :

1. Weighted Routing – Percentages of traffic are directed to specific endpoints using weighted rules.

Eg- 20% us-eas1, 80% us-west-1

1. Latency Routing – Traffic is routed to the locations with the lowest latency according to latency criteria.

Eg:- African user – 54ms – eu-west , 300ms – sydney

1. Failover Routing – When the primary server is unavailable, Failover enables a developer to set a fallback endpoint.

Eg- Health policy, Primary(active) site – eu-west-2, secondary(passive) side – us-east1

1. Geolocation Routing – A developer can use geolocation to divert traffic based on its geolocation origin.

Eg – European customers to Europe, us to us location

1. Multivalue Routing – One record – multiple IPs- with health checks. 8 healthy records .. if one site comes down .. health check will direct to another site.

 

Why is it called Route 53?

The name AWS Route 53 is derived from Port 53, which handles DNS for both TCP and UDP traffic requests; the phrase Route could relate to routing or a common highway naming convention.

 

Does Route 53 Do load balancing?

Yes. Associating multiple IP addresses with a single record is often used for balancing the load of geographically-distributed web servers. Amazon Route 53 allows you to list multiple IP addresses for an A record and responds to DNS requests with the list of all configured IP addresses.

 

Does Amazon Route 53 support NS records?

Yes, Amazon Route 53 supports Name Service (NS) records.

 

How can we add a load balancer to Route 53?

1. Launch the Route 53 console in the AWS Management Console by navigating to https://console.aws.amazon.com/route53/.
2. Select Hosted zones from the navigation pane.
3. Select the hosted zone with the domain name you wish to use to redirect traffic to your load balancer.
4. Create Record by entering the following values: Routing policy, Record name, Alias, Value/Route traffic to, Record type (Select A – IPv4 address), Evaluate target health

Within 60 seconds, changes are normally propagated to all Route 53 servers. When propagation is complete, we can use the name of the alias record you created in this step to send traffic to your load balancer.

 

What are “A” and “Cname”?

 A – This resource record set is used when you want to map a unique hostname (e.g., example.com ) or alias (e.g., www.example.com ) to a single IPv4 address or the associated private IP addresses with an Elastic IP Address or Auto Scaling group.

CNAME – This resource record set is used when you want to map multiple hostnames (e.g., www1, www2, www3…) to a single DNS entry (e.g., example.com).

 

What are “MX” and “TEXT”?

MX – This is a resource record set. It can help you set up an email with Route 53. If someone else manages your email, use it to ensure it is up-to-date.

TXT – This resource record set is used when you want Route 53 to store arbitrary text data (up to 156 bytes) in a DNS “TXT” record. For example, this can be helpful if you need to provide information about an endpoint that isn’t supported by existing types of records.

 

What is AWS Cname, and how it can be added to route53?

An alternate domain name, also known as a CNAME.

An alias record can be used with Route 53 to point the parent domain to other supported alias targets.

 

Is it possible to integrate Amazon Route 53 with other AWS services like CloudFront and S3? If yes, then how?

Yes, it is possible to integrate Amazon Route 53 with other AWS services like CloudFront and S3. You can do this by creating an Amazon Route 53 alias record that points to your CloudFront distribution or S3 bucket.

 

Do all queries sent through Amazon Route 53 get routed through Amazon’s DNS servers?

No, not all queries sent through Amazon Route 53 get routed through Amazon’s DNS servers. If you are using Amazon Route 53 as your DNS service, you can choose to have some of your queries routed through Amazon’s DNS servers and some routed through another DNS service, such as Google DNS or Cloudflare DNS.

 

Is it possible to route traffic based on user location using Amazon Route 53? If yes, then how?

Yes, it is possible to route traffic based on user location using Amazon Route 53. You can do this by creating a geolocation resource record set. This will allow you to specify a location, such as a country or continent, and then route traffic to a specific resource, such as an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon EC2 instance, based on that location.

 

Suppose my company wants to launch its website globally over the next few months but doesn’t want to invest in web hosting infrastructure right away. Can Amazon Route 53 help us achieve this?

Yes, Amazon Route 53 can help you launch your website globally without investing in web hosting infrastructure right away. Amazon Route 53 provides a global network of DNS servers that can route traffic to your website no matter where it is hosted. This means that you can launch your website in any region without having to set up web hosting infrastructure there first.

 

What is latency-based routing and what are its benefits?

Latency-based routing is a method of routing traffic to different resources based on the amount of latency that the user experiences. This can be beneficial because it can help to ensure that users are always routed to the resource that will provide them with the best experience.

 

What’s the impact of health checks on the overall cost of operations?

Health checks come at a small additional cost to the overall cost of operations for Amazon Route 53. This is because Route 53 needs to periodically check the health of your resources and make sure that they are up and running. However, this cost is generally outweighed by the benefits of having health checks in place, as they can help to avoid downtime and ensure that your website or application is always available to users.

 

Does Amazon Route 53 offer redundancy options?

Yes, Amazon Route 53 offers a number of redundancy options to help keep your website or application up and running even if an Amazon data center goes offline. One option is to use Amazon Route 53’s Latency-Based Routing, which automatically routes traffic to the fastest data center. Another option is to use Amazon Route 53’s Geo DNS, which lets you route traffic to different data centers based on the geographic location of your users.

 

What is the default TTL setting for records created in Amazon Route 53?

The default TTL setting for records created in Amazon Route 53 is 1 hour.

 

What Is Cloudtrail and How Do Cloudtrail and Route 53 Work Together?

CloudTrail is a service that captures information about every request sent to the Amazon Route 53 API by an AWS account, including requests that are sent by IAM users. CloudTrail saves log files of these requests to an Amazon S3 bucket. CloudTrail captures information about all requests. You can use information in the CloudTrail log files to determine which requests were sent to Amazon Route 53, the IP address that the request was sent from, who sent the request, when it was sent, and more.

 

What is the difference between Latency Based Routing and Geo DNS?

The Geo-Based DNS routing takes decisions based on the geographic location of the request. Whereas, Latency Based Routing utilizes latency measurements between networks and AWS data centers. Latency Based Routing is used when you want to give your customers the lowest latency possible. On the other hand, Geo Based routing is used when you want to direct the customer to different websites based on the country or region they are browsing from.

 

What is the difference between a Domain and a Hosted Zone?

Domain : A domain is a collection of data describing a self-contained administrative and technical unit. For example, www.abcd.com is a domain and a general DNS concept.

Hosted zone : A hosted zone is a container that holds information about how you want to route traffic on the internet for a specific domain. For example, lms.abcd.com is a hosted zone.

 

How does Amazon Route 53 provide high availability and low latency?

Here’s how Amazon Route 53 provides the resources in question:

Globally Distributed Servers

Amazon is a global service and consequently has DNS services globally. Any customer creating a query from any part of the world gets to reach a DNS server local to them that provides low latency.

Dependency

Route 53 provides a high level of dependability required by critical applications

Optimal Locations

Route 53 uses a global anycast network to answer queries from the optimal position automatically.