Overview of Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available, scalable, fully managed, and authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) service provided by AWS. It allows customers full control over their DNS records, enabling the routing of internet traffic to their AWS resources, such as an Amazon EC2 instance, by translating domain names (like example.com) into IP addresses.

Key Features of Amazon Route 53

• Authoritative DNS Service: Customers can update DNS records as needed.
• Domain Registration: Acts as a domain registrar, allowing users to register domain names directly.
• Health Checks: Ability to monitor the health of your resources.
• Service Level Agreement (SLA): Offers a 100% availability SLA.
• Named for DNS Port: The service name references the DNS port number, 53.

DNS Records in Route 53

DNS records in Route 53 define how to route traffic for a specific domain. Each record contains:

• Domain or Subdomain Names: For example, example.com.
• Record Type: Types include A, AAAA, CNAME, and NS.
• Value: The IP address or hostname where the domain should point.
• Routing Policy: Determines how Route 53 responds to queries.
• Time to Live (TTL): The caching duration at DNS resolvers.
• Supported Record Types: Essential types include A, AAAA, CNAME, and NS. Other advanced types are also supported.

Important DNS Record Types

• A Record: Maps a hostname to an IPv4 address.
• AAAA Record: Maps a hostname to an IPv6 address.
• CNAME Record: Maps a hostname to another hostname (not for top nodes or Zone Apex).