Route 53

DNS Services

Routing Policies

  • Simple - No health checks
  • Weighted - Split requests by %, supports health checks
  • Latency - Sends traffic to region with lowest latency
  • Failover - Active/Passive Routing

Common DNS Types

  • Start of authority record (SOA) - Specifies authoritative information about a DNS zone, including the primary name server, the email of the domain administrator, the domain serial number, and several timers relating to refreshing the zone.
  • Nameserver (NS) - Delegates a DNS zone to use the given authoritative name servers
  • Address (A) - IP address to direct traffic to
  • Canonical Name (CNAMES) - Alias of one name to another
  • Mail Exchange (MX) - Maps a domain name to a list of message transfer agents
  • PTR - Pointer to a canonical name

Facts

  • You can register domains on AWS
  • Sometimes it can take days to register a new domain name
  • You can integrate SNS to be notified of health check failures
  • Health checks can be applied to individual record sets
  • Given the choice always choose an alias record over a CNAME