Route 53

  • The Start of Authority (SOA) record stores the following information:
    • The name of the server that supplied the data for the zone
    • The administrator of the zone
    • The current version of the data file
    • The default number of seconds for the TTL file on resource records
  • CNAME – Can be used to resolve one domain name to another (m.noelalvarez.net > mobile.noelalvarez.net) but can’t be used for naked domain names (zone apex record). For example, you can’t have a CNAME for https://noelalvarez.net. The CNAME must be either an A record or an alias.
  • Alias Record – Used to map resource record sets in your hosted zone to Elastic Load Balancers, CloudFront distributions, or S3 buckets that are configured as websites.
  • Routing Policies
    • Simple routing – With the simple routing policy you can only have one record with multiple IP addresses. If you specify multiple values in a record, Route 53 returns all values to the user in a random order. For example, noelalvarez.net > 1.1.1.1, 2.2.2.2, and 3.3.3.3.
    • Weighted routing – Allows you to split your traffic based on different weights assigned. For example, you can direct 10% of your traffic to US-EAST-1 and 90% to EU-WEST-1.
      • Health Checks – May be set on individual record sets.
    • Latency-based routing – Allows you to route your traffic based on the lowest network latency for your end user (which region will provide the fastest response time)
    • Failover routing – Allows you to create an active/passive set up (automatic failover). For example, your primary site will be US-EAST-1 and your secondary DR site in US-EAST-2. Route 53 will monitor the health of your primary site using a health check.
    • Geolocation routing – Lets you choose where your traffic will be sent based on the geographic location of your users (the location from which the DNS queries originate). For example, you might want all queries from North America to be routed to a fleet of EC2 instances that are specifically configured for your North American customers.
    • Geoproximity routing (traffic flow only)
    • Multivalue answer routing – Lets you configure Amazon Route 53 to return multiple values, such as IP addresses for your web servers, in response to DNS queries. You can specify multiple values for almost any record, but multivalue answer routing also lets you check the health of each resource, so Route 53 only returns values for healthy resources. This is similar to simple routing. However, it allows you to put health checks on each record set.