AWS route 53 and what you need to know

This article will introduce you to what is route 53, the benefits, routing policies and key features.

What is route 53?

Scenario: Someone is trying to access a website and they receive a service not available response!

This is not ideal as a service owner. The service owner wants to manage these scenarios and direct the customers to services that are running and healthy.

Route 53 can scale resources efficiently, it can be used to mask these issues for your customers and provide high availability of your service

Route 53 is a highly scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service that allows internet application owners to provide highly available services to their customers.
The three main functions:

1. A website can register a domain name using Route 53.
2. Connects the user to your service when the user enters your domain name in their web browser.
3. Route53 checks the health of resources by sending automated requests. It constantly checks if your service/infrastructure is healthy.

Advantages:

1. Highly scalable. Automatically handles large queries.
2. Highly reliable
3. Easy to use. You purchase the domain name and map it to the application or any resource.
4. Cost effective
5. Secure. Access to Route 53 is available to AWS IAM

Routing policies

When you create a record in route 53 ( a record is an entry) you choose a routing policies.
The routing policy selected will dictate how route 53 will respond to your queries basically how calls are handled.

Simple routing policy

Routes traffic to a single resource. This is a one to one mapping, for example mapping a url to a web server.

Failover routing policy

If you want to configure a failover to a backup resource. This policy will route traffic to a healthy primary resource. If this primary resource becomes unhealthy then a secondary or back up is configured to receive calls.

Geolocation Routing

Routes the resources based on a geographic location. It localises content and these locations are specified by continent or country.

Geoproximity Routing

Routes traffic based on geographic location of users and their resources. There is an option to route traffic to a given resource by specifying a value known as a bias. This can shrink and expand a region based on bias.

Latency based routing

Used when we have resources in multiple regions and we want to route traffic to the region that provides the best latency at any given point in time. Used when performance is your criteria.

Multivalue Answer Routing

Allows you to define 8 records that will recieve a request in a random fashion and this will distribute the load of requests. It will return mutliple values in response to DNS queries.

Weighted routing policy

Distributes routing based on a weight distribution specified. Used for software launches etc.

Key Features:

1. Traffic flow: routes end users to the endpoint that should provide the best experience.
2. Domain Registration: we can buy domain names can be purchased from route 53.
3. Health checks: monitors health and performance of the applications.
4. Weighted round-robin load balancing: spreads traffic between several servers.

Access to use route 53:

1. AWS console
2. AWS sdk
3. Route 53 API
4. AWS Command Line Interface
5. AWS tools for powershell

Links to tutorials:

1. AWS Route 53 Tutorial

Hope you learned something.

-R