Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. You can use Route 53 to perform three main functions in any combination: domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking.

  • Records types:
    • SOA records
    • NS Records
    • CNAME records
    • A records
  • Routing Policies:
    • Simple routing: 1 record multiple IPs
    • Weighted routing: % balance traffic
    • Latency-Based routing: ms balance traffic
    • Failover routing: Active/Passive failure traffic
    • Geolocation routing: EU/US location traffic
    • Geoproximity routing: used for traffic low
    • Multivalue answer routing

Health Checks

  • You can set health checks on individual record sets.
  • If a record set fails a health check, it will be removed from Route 53 until it passes the health check.
  • You can set SNS notifications to alert you about failed health checks.

A Record VS CNAME

The A record points a name to a specific IP. If you want blog.dnsimple.com to point to the server 185.31.17.133 you’ll configure:

blog.dnsimple.com.     A        185.31.17.133

The CNAME record points a name to another name instead of to an IP. The CNAME source represents an alias for the target name and inherits its entire resolution chain.