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šŸš€ Unlock the Power of Amazon Route 53 for Your Internet Applications! šŸŒ

Vundela Lakshmi Devi's photo
Vundela Lakshmi Devi
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4 min read

Table of contents

Introduction

Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed route end-user requests to internet applications by translating domain names (like www.example.com) into IP addresses (like 192.0.2.1) that computers use to connect to each other.

Domain Name: A domain name is the human-readable version of this address. It's the name you type into a web browser to visit a website, like "google.com" or "amazon.com".

Functions of Route 53

Route 53 to perform three main functions in any combination

  1. Domain registration

    You can register domain names directly through Route 53. This means you can search for and purchase domain names, then set up and manage DNS records for those domains, all within Route 53.

    AWS also supports DNS configurations with AWS even if domain registration is done from external domain sites like GoDaddy etc.

  2. DNS routing

    DNS routing determines the route to direct the traffic when request is send to an browser .

    Route 53 configures DNS by creating hosted zones.

    Hosted Zonesā€”> Hosted zone is like a container that holds information about how to route traffic for a specific domain name.

    Public Hosted Zone: Determines how traffic is routed on the internet.

    Privte Hosted Zone: Determines how traffic is routed within the VPC

    Hosted zones contains records to tell the server which IP addresses correspond to which domain names.

    ā€”>A Record: Maps a domain name to an IPv4 address.

    ā€”> AAAA Record: Maps a domain name to an IPv6 address.

    ā€”> CNAME Record: Points one domain name to another domain name.

    ā€”> MX Record: Specifies the mail server responsible for receiving emails for a domain.

    ā€”> TXT Record: Holds text information to provide additional data about the domain

  3. Health Checking

    Route 53 sends automated requests over the internet to a resource, such as a web server, to verify that it's reachable, available, and functional, and ensures route traffic only to healthy endpoints.

    You can optionally configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms for your health checks, so that you receive notification when a resource becomes unavailable.

    Example: If your primary web server goes down, a health check can detect this and Route 53 can redirect traffic to a backup server.

Types of Routing Policies

  • Simple Routing: Directs traffic to a single resource.

  • Weighted Routing: Distributes traffic across multiple resources based on specified weights. For example, 70% of the traffic goes to Server A and 30% to Server B.

  • Latency-Based Routing: Routes traffic to the resource with the lowest latency (fastest response time) for the userā€™s location.

  • Geolocation Routing: Routes traffic based on the geographic location of the user. For example, users in Europe can be routed to servers in the EU.

  • Failover Routing:- It routes traffic to another or alternate resource when the previous resource is unhealthy.

How Amazon Route 53 routes traffic for your domain

After you set up Amazon Route 53 to direct your internet traffic to your resources, like web servers or Amazon S3 buckets, here's what happens in just a few milliseconds when someone requests content for www.example.com:

  1. A user opens a web browser, enters www.example.com in the address bar, and presses Enter.

  2. The request for www.example.com is routed to a DNS resolver, which is typically managed by the user's internet service provider (ISP), such as a cable internet provider, a DSL broadband provider, or a corporate network.

  3. The DNS resolver for the ISP forwards the request for www.example.com to a DNS root name server.

  4. The DNS resolver forwards the request for www.example.com again, this time to one of the TLD name servers for .com domains. The name server for .com domains responds to the request with the names of the four Route 53 name servers that are associated with the example.com domain.

    The DNS resolver caches (stores) the four Route 53 name servers. The next time someone browses to example.com, the resolver skips steps 3 and 4 because it already has the name servers for example.com. The name servers are typically cached for two days.

  5. The DNS resolver chooses a Route 53 name server and forwards the request for www.example.com to that name server.

  6. The Route 53 name server looks in the example.com hosted zone for the www.example.com record, gets the associated value, such as the IP address for a web server, 192.0.2.44, and returns the IP address to the DNS resolver.

  7. The DNS resolver finally has the IP address that the user needs. The resolver returns that value to the web browser.

  8. The web browser sends a request for www.example.com to the IP address that it got from the DNS resolver. This is where your content is, for example, a web server running on an Amazon EC2 instance or an Amazon S3 bucket that's configured as a website endpoint.

  9. The web server or other resource at 192.0.2.44 returns the web page for www.example.com to the web browser, and the web browser displays the page.

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