Amazon Route 53 Announces Fast Interval Health Checks and Configurable Failover Thresholds

Posted on: Feb 18, 2014

We are excited to announce two new features for Route 53 health checks and DNS Failover: fast interval health checks and configurable failover thresholds.

With fast interval health checks, Route 53 performs health check observations of your endpoint (for example, a web server) every 10 seconds instead of the default interval of 30 seconds. This enables Route 53 to confirm more quickly that an endpoint is unavailable and shortens the time required for DNS Failover to redirect traffic.

Configurable failover thresholds let you specify the number of consecutive health check observations required for Route 53 to confirm that an endpoint has switched from a healthy to unhealthy state, or vice versa, from 1 to 10 observations. You can select a lower threshold in order to fail over more quickly after an endpoint becomes unavailable, or a higher threshold to prevent traffic from being redirected in response to temporary or transient events.

You can use health checks along with Route 53's DNS Failover feature to help detect an outage of your website and redirect your end users to alternate locations where your application is operating properly. You can also use health checks to monitor your website's availability. Route 53 health checks are integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, so you can view the current and past status of your health checks, or configure alarms and notifications.

Getting started is easy. To learn more, visit the Route 53 product page for full details and pricing, or see our documentation.