Amazon Route 53 Documentation

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is designed to be compliant with IPv6 as well.

Amazon Route 53 connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS – such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS. You can use Amazon Route 53 to configure DNS health checks, then monitor your applications’ ability to recover from failures and manage application recovery with Route 53 Application Recovery Controller.

Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow enables 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 help you enable various low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures. Using Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow’s visual editor, you can manage how your end-users are routed to your application’s endpoints—whether in a single AWS region or distributed around the globe. Amazon Route 53 also offers Domain Name Registration – you can purchase and manage domain names and configure DNS settings for your domains in Amazon Route 53.

Get recursive DNS for your Amazon VPC and on-premises networks. Create conditional forwarding rules and DNS endpoints to resolve custom names mastered in Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones or in your on-premises DNS servers.

Connect Route 53 Resolvers on Outpost racks with DNS servers in your on-premises data centers through Route 53 Resolver endpoints.

Protect your recursive DNS queries within the Route 53 Resolver. Create domain lists and build firewall rules that filter outbound DNS traffic against these rules.

Periodically audit your resources across Availability Zones or Regions for recovery readiness.

Use on/off switches, integrated with DNS records of your top-level resources, to failover traffic.

Make sure that specific rules are followed during failover to protect automated recovery actions from impairing availability. 

Temporarily shift traffic for your load balancer resource, away from an Availability Zone you specify.

Authorize AWS to automatically shift traffic for your load balancer resource, away from an Availability Zone that AWS detects is impaired, until the Availability Zone recovers.

Global traffic management: route end users to endpoints for your application based on geoproximity, latency, health, and other considerations.

Route end users to the geographically nearest resource that is available, based on configurations you specify.

Route end users to AWS regions based on latency.

Fine-tune your DNS routing approach based on the Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block that the query-originating IP address belongs to.

Route end users to a particular endpoint that you specify based on the end user’s geographic location.

Manage custom domain names for your internal AWS resources without exposing DNS data to the public Internet.

Automatically route your website visitors to an alternate location to avoid site outages.

Amazon Route 53 can monitor the health and performance of your application as well as your web servers and other resources.

Amazon Route 53 offers domain name registration services, where you can search for and register available domain names or transfer in existing domain names to be managed by Route 53.

Enable DNSSEC signing for existing and new public hosted zones, as well as DNSSEC validation for Amazon Route 53 Resolver.

Enable visitors to access your website at the zone apex (or "root domain")—for example, example.com instead of www.example.com.

Enable visitors to access your website hosted on Amazon S3 at the zone apex (or "root domain").

Amazon Route 53 is integrated with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

Use the AWS Management Console to manage Amazon Route 53 using a graphical user interface.

Amazon Route 53 offers Weighted Round Robin (WRR) functionality.

Your DNS records are organized into “hosted zones” that can store DNS records for your domain. Upon creating a hosted zone, Route 53 automatically populates your hosted zone with the names of four Route 53 name servers across four different top-level domains to increase the level of availability. If you don’t have a domain name, you can search for available domains and register them using the Route 53 console. If you have an existing domain name, you can opt to have it transferred to Route 53’s management so that you can manage both your domain names and your DNS configuration using Route 53. You can add, delete or change records in your hosted zone using the AWS Management Console or by calling the ChangeResourceRecordSetAPI. 

Route 53 uses a global network of DNS servers at a series of world-wide locations in North America, Europe, South America, Asia, Australia & New Zealand, and Middle East and Africa. 

For additional information about service controls, security features and functionalities, including, as applicable, information about storing, retrieving, modifying, restricting, and deleting data, please see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html. This additional information does not form part of the Documentation for purposes of the AWS Customer Agreement available at http://aws.amazon.com/agreement, or other agreement between you and AWS governing your use of AWS’s services.