Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.

Amazon Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS – such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.

What is DNS?

What is IPv4 and IPv6?

Top Level Domains

IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority)

Domain Registrars

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)

WhoIS DB for Domain Name search

InterNIC Service of ICANN

Below is simple Example of how browser resolving domain name to IP Address

Below is simple Example of how Hosting server change happens in Domain Registrar site

Hosted Zone

A hosted zone is a collection of resource record sets for a specified domain. You create a hosted zone for a domain (such as example.com), and then you create resource record sets to tell the Domain Name System how you want traffic to be routed for that domain. When you create a hosted zone, Amazon Route 53 automatically creates a name server (NS) record and a start of authority (SOA) record for the zone. The NS record identifies the four name servers that you give to your registrar or your DNS service so that DNS queries are routed to Amazon Route 53 name servers.

DNS Record Types

SOA (Start Of Authority) Record:

SOA means Start of Authority and is a significant part of a zone file in the domain name system (DNS). A SOA-Record contains important management information about the zone, especially regarding the zone transfer.  Keeping SOA record in DSN server is standard, this will help at the time Zone file Change/Transfer happens from Primary to Secondary servers.

Background:

Normally DNS name servers are set up in clusters. The database within this clusters is synchronized through zone transfers. The SOA-Record in the zone file contains data to control the zone transfer. This is the serial number and different timespans.It also contains the e-mail-address of the responsible person for this zone as well as the name of the primary master server. Usually the SOA-Record is located at the top of the zone. A zone without a SOA-Record does not meet the standard and is therefore not transferable.

Also, the SOA record is perhaps the least understood record in the entire zone file.  But it controls the speed that any update is propagated thourghout the Internet.  The purpose of the SOA record is:

• Identify the DNS server that is authoritative for all information within the domain.
• List the email address of the person in charge of the domain.
• Control how often secondary servers check for changes to the zone file.
• Control how long secondary servers keep the zone file active when the primary server cannot be contacted.
• Control how long a negative response is cached by a DNS resolver (but for some DNS servers, this is also how long a DNS resolver should cache any response).

NS (Name Server) Record:

Note: Name Server is nothing but one of the Physical Domain Name Server of AWS’ Route 53 service.  This domain name server (DNS) Server contains all the records which are being used to resolve Internet address Name to Internet IP when user request for web site via Browser.

A (Address) Record:

TTL (Time to Live) Record:

CNames (Canonical Names) Record:

Alias Record:

Below are few other DNS records in industry.

Simple Routing Policy

When you create a resource record set, you choose a routing policy, which determines how Amazon Route 53 responds to queries.  Below are Routing policies available in AWS.

• Simple routing policy – Use for a single resource that performs a given function for your domain, for example, a web server that serves content for the example.com website.

• Failover routing policy – Use when you want to configure active-passive failover.

• Geoproximity routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your resources and, optionally, shift traffic from one resources in one location to resources in another.

• Latency routing policy – Use when you have resources in multiple locations and you want to route traffic to the resource that provides the best latency.

• Multivalue answer routing policy – Use when you want Amazon Route 53 to respond to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records selected at random.

• Weighted routing policy – Use to route traffic to multiple resources in proportions that you specify.

Health Checks

Route 53 health checks monitor the health and performance of your application's servers, or endpoints, from a network of health checkers in locations around the world. You can specify either a domain name or an IP address and a port to create HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP health checks that check the health of the endpoint.

Traffic Flow

The traffic flow visual editor lets you create sophisticated routing configurations for your resources using existing routing types such as failover and geolocation. You save the configuration as a traffic policy and then use it to create one or more policy records. Each policy record routes DNS queries for a specified domain or subdomain.

You can create multiple versions of the same traffic policy and use different versions to roll out or roll back configuration changes.

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