Welcome readers, in this tutorial, we will understand AWS Route 53 and its related terminology. But beware it might be a monotonous article without any picture or demo but it is still an interesting read to know the basics of AWS Route 53.
1. Introduction to AWS Route 53
Amazon Route 53 represents the highly available and scalable Domain naming service (DNS) used for registering the domains for the websites, routing, and health checks. Its key features are –
- Domain registration
- Records
- Hosted Zone
- Routing policies
- Health checks and monitoring
- Traffic flow
1.1 Important Route 53 Concepts
Let us understand the important ones in detail.
1.1.1 Domain registration
Domain registration consists of a domain name, domain registrar, domain registry, domain reseller, and the top level. In here,
- We buy a domain name and then register it with the AWS Route 53. The Router 53 will then automatically make the DNS service for the domain by:
- Creating a hosted zone as the same name as your domain
- Assigning a set of four servers to the created hosted zone for browsing purpose
- Getting the name servers from the hosted zone and adding them to the domain
- Also supports the transferring of domain registration to Route53 if it is registered with some another registrar
- In domain registration, DNS Domain name format
1.1.2 Records
- They define the path where we want to route the traffic for each domain name
- They are created in the hosted zone and every record name must end with the name of the hosted zone
- Supports the following type of DNS record types:
Record type Description A Record type Is an IPv4 address in dotted-decimal notation AAAA Record type Is an IPv6 address in a colon-separated hexadecimal format CAA Record type Specify the certificate authority which is used to allow certificate for a domain or a subdomain CNAME Record type Same format as the domain name MX Record type Each value contains two values (i.e. priority and domain name) NS Record type Identifies the naming servers for the hosted zone PTR Record type Same domain name SOA Record type Provides information about the domain and corresponding Route53 hosted zone SPF Record type Stands for Sender policy framework SRV Record type Stands for Service locator MX Record type Stands for Mail exchange record
1.1.3 Hosted Zone
- A hosted zone is a place where Route53 automatically creates the Name Server (popularly known as NS) and the Start of Authority (popularly known as SOA) records for the hosted zones
- Route3 creates a set of 4 unique name servers with each hosted zone
- There are two types of hosted zones –
- The public hosted zone that routes internet traffic to the resources
- The private hosted zone that routes traffic within the AWS VPC. Always remember when a record is created in the private hosted zone following routing policies can be used – Simple, Failover, Multivalue answer, and Weighted
1.1.4 Routing Policies
Route53 supports the following routing policies that are used in a hosted zone –
| Routing policy | Description |
|---|---|
| Simple | This policy maps the domain name to (one or more) ip addresses |
| Weighted | Maps a single DNS to multiple weighted resources i.e. 10% to Resource A, 30% to Resource B and so on |
| Latency | Offers the option of minimum latency for routing the traffic |
| Failover | Active passive failover approach |
| Geoproximity | Chooses the nearest resource (geographic distance) for the user |
| NS Record type | Identifies the naming servers for the hosted zone |
| Multivalue answer | Return multiple healthy records at random and we have the option to configure a health check against every record |
| Geolocation | Select on the basis of user location |
1.1.5 Monitoring
- Route53 dashboard provides detailed information about the status of the domains:
- Status of new domain registrations
- Status of the existing domain registrations transferred to Amazon Route53
- Details of the domain(s) that are going to expire
- Use of Amazon CloudWatch metric to see the number of DNS queries served for each Route53 hosted zone
- Monitoring the resources by creating Route53 health checks which are then consumed by CloudWatch service to prepare real-time metric data
- Use of CloudTrail to log the API calls
2. Pricing
- The hosted zone is charged at the time of creation and on the first day of each subsequent month. However, if a hosted zone is deleted within 12 hours of creation no money is charged
- Traffic flow policy record per month
- Pricing for domain name varies by Top-level domain registrar
3. Summary
In this section, we learned the following:
- Introduction to Route53
- Rout53 characteristics such as Hosted Zone, Routing policies, Monitoring, etc.
- The Pricing of the AWS route 53
That is all for this tutorial! I hope the article served you whatever you were looking for.
If you want to learn more about AWS, check our articles here. Happy Learning and do not forget to share!
