AWS - Route 53 Notes

ROUTE 53
39 | P a g e
Amazon Route 53
It is amazons free DNS Service
Some basics facts;

• IPv4 space is a 32 bit field and has over 4 billion different addresses (4,294,367,296)
• IPv6 has 340 undecillion address ie,
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses
• If we look at common domain names such as google.com, bbc.co.uk, you will notice a
string of characters separated by dots (periods). The last word in a domain name
represents the “top level domain”. The second word in a domain name is known as a
second level domain name (this is optional though and depends on the domain name).
• These top level domain names are controlled by the Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority (IANA) in a root zone database which is essentially a database of all available
top level domains. You can view this database by visiting:
http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db
• Because all of the names in a give domain name have to be unique there needs to be a
way to organize this all so that domain name aren’t duplicated. This is where domain
registrars come in. A registrar is an authority that can assign domain names directly
under one or more top-level domains. These domains are registered with InterNIC, a
service of ICANN, which enforces uniqueness of domain names across the Internet. Each
domain name becomes registered in a central database known as the WhoIS database.
Popular domain registrars include Amazon, GoDaddy.com, 123-reg.co.uk etc.
• When you buy a domain, every DNS address begins with a Start Of Authority record or
an SOA
It contains information about:
o The name of the server that supplied the data for the zone.
o The administrator of the zone.
o The current version of the data file.
o The default number of seconds for the time-to-live file on resource records.
• NS Stands for Name Server Records
They are used by Top Level domain servers to direct traffic to the Content DNS server
which contains the authoritative DNS records.
• An “A” record is the fundamental type of DNS record. The “A” in A record stands for
“Address”. The A record is used by a computer to translate the name of the domain to
an IP address. For example, http://www.google.com to http://123.10.20.30.
40 | P a g e
• TTL: It’s the length that a DNS record is cached on either the Resolving Server or the
users own local PC is equal to the value of the “Time To Live” (TTL) in seconds. The lower
the time to live, the faster changes to DNS records take to propagate throughout the
internet.
• CNAME or a Canonical Name can be used to resolve one domain name to another. For
example, you may have a mobile website with the domain name http://m.acloud.guru
that is used for when users browse to your domain name on their mobile devices. You
may also want the name http://mobile.acloud.guru to resolve to this same address.
• Alias Records are used to map resource record sets in your hosted zone to Elastic Load
Balancers, CloudFront distributions, or S3 buckets that are configured as websites.
Alias records work like a CNAME record in that you can map one DNS name
(www.example.com) to another ‘target’ DNS name (elb123.elb.amazonaws.com)
• Key difference – A CNAME can’t be used for naked domain names (zone apex record.)
You can’t have a CNAME for http://acloud.guru, it must be either an A record or an
Alias.
• You can buy domain names directly with AWS & it can take upto 3 days to register
depending on the circumstances.
Routing Policies Available with Route53
• Simple Routing
If you choose the simple routing policy you can only have one record with multiple IP
addresses. If you specify multiple values in a record, Route 53 returns all values to the
user in a random order.
• Weighted Routing
Allows you to split your traffic based on different weights assigned.
For example, you can set 10% of your traffic to go to US-EAST-1 and 90% to go to EU-
WEST-1
You can set health checks on individual record sets.
If a record set fails a health check it will be removed from Route53 until it passes the
health check.
You can set SNS notifications to alert you if a health check is failed.
41 | P a g e
• Latency-based Routing
Allows you to route your traffic based on the lowest network latency for your end user
(ie, which region will give them the fastest response time).
To use latency-based routing, you create a latency resource record set for the Amazon
EC3 (or ELS) resource in each region that hosts your website. When Amazon Route 53
receives a query for your site, it selects the latency resource record set for the region
that gives the user the lowest latency. Route 53 then responds with the value associated
with that resource record set.
• Failover Routing
Failover routing policies are used when you want to create an active/passive set up. For
example, you may want your primary site to be in EU-WEST-2 and your secondary DR Site in AP-
SOUTHEAST-2.
Route53 will monitor the health of your primary site using a health check.
A health check monitors the health of your end points.
• Geolocation Routing
Geolocation routing lets you choose where your traffic will e sent based on the geographic
location of your users (is the location from which DNS queries originate). For example, you
might want all queries from Europe to be routed to a fleet of EC2 instances that are specifically
configured for your European customers. These servers may have the local language of your
European customers and all prices are displayed in Euros.
• Geoproximity Routing (Traffic Flow only)

Geoproximity routing lets Amazon Route 53 route traffic to your resources based on the
geographic location of your users and your resources. You can also optionally choose to route
more traffic or less to a given resource by specifying a value, known as a bias. A bias expands or
shrinks the size of the geographic region from which traffic is routed to a resource.
To use Geoproximity routing, you must use Route 53 traffic flow.
• Multivalue Answer Policy

Multivalue answer routing lets you configure Amazon Route 53 to return multiple values, such
as IP addresses for your web servers, in response to DNS queries. You can specify multiple
values for almost any record, but multivalue answer routing also lets you check the health of
each resource, so Route 53 returns only values for healthy resources.
This is similar to simple routing however it allows you to put health checks on each record set.
42 | P a g e

AWS - Route 53 Notes

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

AWS - Route 53 Notes

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

AWS - Route 53 Notes

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

ROUTE 53

It is amazons free DNS Service

Some basics facts;

Routing Policies Available with Route53

• Geoproximity Routing (Traffic Flow only)

• Multivalue Answer Policy

You might also like