Overview of the Concept of Route 53

  • In order to understand the concept of route 53, it is crucial to understand that it is an – 
    • Authoritative
    • highly available
    • scalable
    • cloud DNS service by AWS
  • Limit of 50 domain names on Route 53
  • compatible with IPv6
  • Traffic flow: Route users to best location based on latency, geography, target health, etc.
  • Private DNS: Route 53 can also manage private addresses, and will only resolve those domains if they come from within the specified VPC.
  • DNS failover: Route 53 will monitor health of applications and route requests away from unhealthy resources. Useful for creating backup sites.
  • Multiple IPs can be associated with a single record.
  • The concept of Route 53 propagates DNS changes within 60 seconds, based on network conditions.
  • Allows management of mappings between domain names and IP addresses (records)
  • replies to “queries” for translating domain names to IP address
  • routing on port 53
  • can register and manage new domains
  • It monitors health of applications using configuration
  • If health checks fail, it disables endpoint for time as per TTL
  • Use ELB for load balancing
  • Traffic Flow application
    • is a visual editor
    • Can create complex routing policies spanning multiple regions and environments.
  • ELBs operate on domain names only, and not on fixed IPv4 or IPv6 addresses.
  • Health checks and monitoring: Route 53 will monitor the health of applications using configurations that we make. When health checks fail, Route 53 will disable that endpoint for the amount of time specified in the TTL for that record set, so specify shorter TTLs, ideally around 60 seconds. There is no load-balancing based on target health, that’s what ELBs are for. Note that if all health checks for all endpoints are failing, Route 53 will behave as if they are all passing, and route traffic to them.
  • With Route 53 you can register and manage new domains.
  • Traffic Flow is a visual editor that allows you to create complex routing policies spanning multiple regions and environments.
  • Not possible to use an A Record to resolve to an ELB, use an Alias record

Hosted Zones

  • designed to allow easy management of multiple domain names and records.
  • Each hosted zone is created for a second-level domain
  • can in turn contain records and sub-domains for that second-level domain.

Aliases

  • Aliases can only be used to map to internal AWS resources, like ELB’s, CloudFront distributions, Elastic Beanstalk environments, and S3 buckets.
  • Unlike CNAMEs, Alias records exist only inside Route 53.
  • They are not visible to resolvers.
  • You can create an Alias of the zone apex, but not a CNAME.
  • Alias queries are free.

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