Amazon Route 53 logo

Amazon Route 53

A highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
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What is Amazon Route 53?

Amazon Route 53 is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) – such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.
Amazon Route 53 is a tool in the DNS Management category of a tech stack.

Who uses Amazon Route 53?

Companies
2861 companies reportedly use Amazon Route 53 in their tech stacks, including Airbnb, Pinterest, and Amazon.

Developers
10985 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Amazon Route 53.

Amazon Route 53 Integrations

SignalFx, AWS Shield, Cloudcraft, Architect, and Eucalyptus are some of the popular tools that integrate with Amazon Route 53. Here's a list of all 11 tools that integrate with Amazon Route 53.
Pros of Amazon Route 53
185
High-availability
148
Simple
103
Backed by amazon
76
Fast
54
Auhtoritive dns servers are spread over different tlds
29
One stop solution for all our cloud needs
26
Easy setup and monitoring
20
Low-latency
17
Flexible
15
Secure
3
API available
1
Dynamically setup new clients
1
Easily add client DNS entries.
Decisions about Amazon Route 53

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Amazon Route 53 in their tech stack.

Eric Sherrill
Service Engineer at Zix Corporation · | 4 upvotes · 55.6K views

We are looking for advice / best-practices / caveats about migrating off BIND on to Unbound https://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/ for internal & external (customer-facing) DNS. Is unbound suitable for this, or is it only recommended for caching? How easy or difficult is it to move 10000's of existing BIND DNS zone entries? We already use Amazon Route 53 for our AWS instances and Cloud DNS for our GCP ones, but would like to maintain internal DNS for cost, control, and latency reasons.

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Deep Shah
Software Engineer at Amazon · | 6 upvotes · 939.5K views

I only know Java and so thinking of building a web application in the following order. I need some help on what alternatives I can choose. Open to replace components, services, or infrastructure.

  • Frontend: AngularJS, Bootstrap
  • Web Framework: Spring Boot
  • Database: Amazon DynamoDB
  • Authentication: Auth0
  • Deployment: Amazon EC2 Container Service
  • Local Testing: Docker
  • Marketing: Mailchimp (Separately Export from Auth0)
  • Website Domain: GoDaddy
  • Routing: Amazon Route 53

PS: Open to exploring options of going completely native ( AWS Lambda, AWS Security but have to learn all)

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Erwin Saputra
Senior Software Engineer at Appsindo Technology · | 1 upvote · 6.6K views
Shared insights
at

We utilize it as main DNS for frontend servers, Dynamic DNS for internal VPCS and simple signal flag storage for autoscaled instances Amazon Route 53

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Simon Bettison
Managing Director at Bettison.org Limited · | 8 upvotes · 745.9K views
Shared insights
at

In 2012 we made the very difficult decision to entirely re-engineer our existing monolithic LAMP application from the ground up in order to address some growing concerns about it's long term viability as a platform.

Full application re-write is almost always never the answer, because of the risks involved. However the situation warranted drastic action as it was clear that the existing product was going to face severe scaling issues. We felt it better address these sooner rather than later and also take the opportunity to improve the international architecture and also to refactor the database in. order that it better matched the changes in core functionality.

PostgreSQL was chosen for its reputation as being solid ACID compliant database backend, it was available as an offering AWS RDS service which reduced the management overhead of us having to configure it ourselves. In order to reduce read load on the primary database we implemented an Elasticsearch layer for fast and scalable search operations. Synchronisation of these indexes was to be achieved through the use of Sidekiq's Redis based background workers on Amazon ElastiCache. Again the AWS solution here looked to be an easy way to keep our involvement in managing this part of the platform at a minimum. Allowing us to focus on our core business.

Rails ls was chosen for its ability to quickly get core functionality up and running, its MVC architecture and also its focus on Test Driven Development using RSpec and Selenium with Travis CI providing continual integration. We also liked Ruby for its terse, clean and elegant syntax. Though YMMV on that one!

Unicorn was chosen for its continual deployment and reputation as a reliable application server, nginx for its reputation as a fast and stable reverse-proxy. We also took advantage of the Amazon CloudFront CDN here to further improve performance by caching static assets globally.

We tried to strike a balance between having control over management and configuration of our core application with the convenience of being able to leverage AWS hosted services for ancillary functions (Amazon SES , Amazon SQS Amazon Route 53 all hosted securely inside Amazon VPC of course!).

Whilst there is some compromise here with potential vendor lock in, the tasks being performed by these ancillary services are no particularly specialised which should mitigate this risk. Furthermore we have already containerised the stack in our development using Docker environment, and looking to how best to bring this into production - potentially using Amazon EC2 Container Service

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Blog Posts

Amazon Route 53's Features

  • Highly Available and Reliable – Route 53 is built using AWS’s highly available and reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of our DNS servers helps ensure a consistent ability to route your end users to your application. Route 53 is designed to provide the level of dependability required by important applications. Amazon Route 53 is backed by the Amazon Route 53 Service Level Agreement.
  • Scalable – Route 53 is designed to automatically scale to handle very large query volumes without any intervention from you.
  • Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Route 53 is designed to work well with other AWS features and offerings. You can use Route 53 to map domain names to your Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and other AWS resources. By using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service with Route 53, you get fine grained control over who can update your DNS data. You can use Route 53 to map your zone apex (example.com versus www.example.com) to your Elastic Load Balancing instance or Amazon S3 website bucket using a feature called Alias record.
  • Simple – With self-service sign-up, Route 53 can start to answer your DNS queries within minutes. You can configure your DNS settings with the AWS Management Console or our easy-to-use API. You can also programmatically integrate the Route 53 API into your overall web application. For instance, you can use Route 53’s API to create a new DNS record whenever you create a new EC2 instance.
  • Fast – Using a global anycast network of DNS servers around the world, Route 53 is designed to automatically route your users to the optimal location depending on network conditions. As a result, the service offers low query latency for your end users, as well as low update latency for your DNS record management needs.
  • Cost-Effective – Route 53 passes on the benefits of AWS’s scale to you. You pay only for managing domains through the service and the number of queries that the service answers for each of your domains, at a low cost and without minimum usage commitments or any up-front fees.
  • Secure – By integrating Route 53 with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), you can grant unique credentials and manage permissions for every user within your AWS account and specify who has access to which parts of the Route 53 service.
  • Flexible – Route 53 offers Weighted Round-Robin (WRR), also known as DNS load balancing. This lets you assign weights to your DNS records that specify what portion of your traffic is routed to various endpoints.

Amazon Route 53 Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Amazon Route 53?
GoDaddy
Go Daddy makes registering Domain Names fast, simple, and affordable. It is a trusted domain registrar that empowers people with creative ideas to succeed online.
Google Cloud DNS
Use Google's infrastructure for production quality, high volume DNS serving. Your users will have reliable, low-latency access to Google's infrastructure from anywhere in the world using our network of Anycast name servers.
CloudFlare
Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.
Google Domains
It is a domain registration service which includes top website builders. The privacy is included at no additional cost. It also includes simple domain management tools.
Namecheap
We provide a set of DNS servers spread across the US and Europe to deliver highly reliable DNS services to everyone. By choosing Namecheap.com as your domain registrar, you are choosing a highly reputable and reliable partner. Namecheap.com is rated 4.6 out of 5 - Based on 1,395 reviews via Google Checkout
See all alternatives

Amazon Route 53's Followers
9123 developers follow Amazon Route 53 to keep up with related blogs and decisions.