A key networking element to AWS is the DNS service named Route 53. Remember, DNS is how we resolve IP addresses to domain names. For example – we access www.yahoo.com by typing that friendly name in a Web browser. Behind the scenes, DNS finds the correct IP address for this name. Think of DNS as a massive phone book. This phone book is distributed to servers all over the globe to ensure resolution can always occur. Hopefully.
It is no surprise that AWS offers a DNS service. After all, AWS has networks all over the world already. They also want to make sure they can provide DNS names to customers for their resources they build in the cloud.
Here are fun facts that you should know about Route 53:
- It is completely compliant with IPv6
- While Route 53 makes it easy to access resources inside of your AWS infrastructure, you could also use it to provide resolution for resources you have outside of their cloud
- Route 53 is capable of DNS health checks so you can ensure traffic is sent to healthy nodes in your infrastructure
- Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow makes it easy for you to manage traffic globally through a variety of routing types, including Latency Based Routing, Geo DNS, Geoproximity, and Weighted Round Robin—all of which can be combined with DNS Failover in order to enable a variety of low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures
- Route 53 also offers domain name registrations, so if you need a domain name for your organization, you do not have to shop beyond AWS for this service
- Private DNS services are possible if you want to use the name resolution inside private VPC structures without advertising names to the public Internet
- Route 53 supports redirection, so you can redirect traffic destined for one domain to another without explicitly impacting the clients
- S3 Zone Apex support now exists – this makes it possible to permit access to your website using just the domain name – for example, http://abcompany.com
