AWS Route 53

Simply speaking, Domain Name System is a translation of a Domain Name to IP Address. Route 53 is Amazon's DNS Service. Some of its features are as follows:

• Its a global service rather than regional service. It uses edge locations.

• It can be used for global resource routing i.e., it can be sued to redirect the nearest server to a user based on region or country or the server with fastest response time.

• Its highly available with almost zero downtime i.e., it provides failover capability to route the user to different server if the server nearest to them is down w/o the user knowing it.

Let's see how to get started with Route 53 to look into the following sub-services that are available with Route 53:

Route 53 after registering the domain can have various options as per the above features:

Hosted Zone

Let's suppose, we have registered a domain on Route 53 or any other domain registration website such as Bigrock or Godaddy or Namecheap. Now, one can purchase and register the domain at one place and can still definitely use AWS Hosted Zone to maintain the DNS records. This is done with the help of pointing the nameservers of the AWS at domain registration website, which can be done as shown below:

Now, there are two ways to create DNS record. One is one record at a time and one is zone wise i.e. by importing the zone file (filenameofrecords.zone). Let's look at the latter first.

To create a single record, the steps are as follows:

Now there is a concept of Alias records. These are not CNAME records but rather an AWS concept. They provide alternate Route 53 way to AWS services such as S3 or Elastic Load Balancers, CloudFront etc. One can simply set the alias record as shown below: