AWS – Route 53 (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 is a highly scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service that converts word-based website addresses like www.example.com into IP addresses like 11.22.33.44.

Amazon Web Services operates worldwide DNS servers at 50+ edge locations. AWS domain queries are automatically routed to the nearest DNS server that will provide the quickest response time, which will help to lower update latency for DNS record management. For example, if you want to remap a domain to a different IP in GoDaddy, it takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours to propagate the change around the world. But in Route 53 the change will take effect within minutes.

AWS Route 53 integrates with other AWS features. You can use it to map domain names to your Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon CloudFront distributions and other AWS resources.

“R53” offers Weighted Round Robin (WRR), also known as DNS load balancing, which allows you to assign weights to DNS records in order to specify which portions of your traffic will be routed to various endpoints. It allows you to load balance your application across multiple regions in order to provide low latency to end users.

It lets you configure DNS failover in active-active, active-passive and mixed configurations to improve your application’s availability. You can configure this service to check the health of your resources so that you can respond to DNS queries using only healthy resources .

For example, if your DR environment is running in another region, you can configure DNS to failover to the DR environment when something goes wrong with live servers.

Find details about DNS failover and health checks here.

1. Create a Hosted Zone

Log in to the Amazon console and navigate to Services->Route 53.

In the AWS console, click Create Hosted Zone tab. Specify a domain name and a comment for your domain.

 

Click the Create Hosted Zone button at the bottom of the screen. This will create the Hosted Zone for your domain, as well as NS and SOA records.

Select the Hosted Zone that you just created and click Go to Records Sets.

 

In Record Sets, you will see the NS and SOA records.

 

2. Create an A Record (IP Address).

Map the domain to an IP address.

Click Create Record Set.

In the right window specify the Name field as www. Route 53 will automatically append “example.com”.

If you want to map the naked domain, e.g.,example.com, leave the Name field blank.

Select A-IPV4 address from the Type dropdown menu.

Keep Alias at the No default value.

By default, TTL is 300 seconds, but you can change it to meet your needs. A 1-hour TTL is good for A records.

Specify your IP address in the Value box.

Leave the Routing Policy at the Simple default.

 

Click Create Record Set.

3. Create a CNAME Record.

Click here for details about about CNAMEs.

Click Create Record Set.

In the right window specify the Name field as www. It will automatically append “example.com”.

If you want to map the naked domain, e.g., example.com, leave the Name field blank.

Select CNAME-Canonical name from the Type drop down menu.

If you are mapping the record to a domain, keep the Alias at the No default value..

By default, TTL is 300 seconds, but you can change it to meet your needs. If you are mapping the CNAME to an existing domain, then 24 hours is the ideal value. If you are mapping to ELB or S3, then 1 hour is the ideal value.

In the Value Box, specify the domain for which you want to map the CNAME.

 

Leave the Routing Policy at the default value of Simple.

If you want to map the domain to an ELB or S3, then select Yes for the Alias.

On the Alias Target box select the ELB or S3 URL.

 

4. Create an MX Record

The steps for creating an MX record are the same as for creating a CNAME record. In the Type field select MX-Mail exchange from the drop down menu.