Amazon Route 53 Adds Health Checking Features: String Matching and HTTPS Support
We are excited to announce two new health-checking features for Amazon Route 53: string matching and HTTPS support.
When you enable Route 53 health checks, Route 53 regularly makes Internet requests to your application's endpoints—for example, web or application servers—from multiple locations around the world to determine whether the endpoint is available.
With string matching health checks, Route 53 searches the body of the response that your endpoint returns. If the response body (typically a web page) contains a string that you specify, Route 53 considers the endpoint healthy. Using string matching health checks, you can help ensure that your web application is serving the correct content, in addition to verifying that the web server is running and reachable over the Internet.
With HTTPS support, you can now create health checks for secure websites that are available only over SSL, to confirm that the web server is available and responding to requests over HTTPS. You can also combine string matching health checks with HTTPS health checks to verify that your secure website is returning the correct content.
You can use health checks along with Route 53's DNS failover feature. With DNS failover, Amazon Route 53 can help detect an outage of your website and redirect your end users to alternate locations where your application is operating properly. Using Route 53 DNS failover, you can run your primary application simultaneously in multiple AWS regions around the world. Route 53 automatically removes from service any region where your application is unavailable. You can also take advantage of a simple backup site hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with Route 53 directing users to this backup site in the event that your application becomes unavailable.
You can also use health checks to monitor your website's availability. Route 53 health checks are integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, and you can view current and past statuses of your health checks, or configure alarms and notifications.
Getting started is easy. To learn more, visit the Route 53 product page or the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide. See the Route 53 product page for full details and pricing.