Amazon Route 53 features

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Key features Functionality About DNS Working with Amazon Route 53s APIs The Amazon Route 53 Global Network Intended Usage and Restrictions

Key features

Get recursive DNS for your Amazon VPCs in AWS Regions, VPCs in AWS Outposts racks, or any other on-premises networks. Create conditional forwarding rules and Route 53 endpoints to resolve custom names mastered in Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones or in your on-premises DNS servers.

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Connect Route 53 Resolvers on Outpost racks with DNS servers in your on-premises data centers through Route 53 Resolver endpoints. This enables resolution of DNS queries between the Outposts racks and your other on-premises resources.

Protect your recursive DNS queries within the Route 53 Resolver. Create domain lists and build firewall rules that filter outbound DNS traffic against these rules.

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Manage one or more shareable configurations for Route 53, including private hosted zones, Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall rule groups, and Route 53 Resolver rules, in the form of a Profile. Automatically apply such configurations across VPCs and AWS accounts, even as new resources are added or updated.

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Easy-to-use and cost-effective global traffic management: route end users to the best endpoint for your application based on geoproximity, latency, health, and other considerations.

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Improves application responsiveness for your end users and helps apply data residency preferences by routing traffic to the geographically nearest resource.

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Route end users to the AWS region that provides the lowest possible latency.

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Fine-tune your DNS routing approach based on the Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block that the query-originating IP address belongs to.

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Route end users to a particular endpoint that you specify based on the end user’s geographic location.

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Manage custom domain names for your internal AWS resources without exposing DNS data to the public Internet.

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Automatically route your website visitors to an alternate location to avoid site outages.

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Amazon Route 53 can monitor the health and performance of your application as well as your web servers and other resources.

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Amazon Route 53 offers domain name registration services, where you can search for and register available domain names or transfer in existing domain names to be managed by Route 53. View a full list of supported top-level domains (TLDs) and current pricing.

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Enable DNSSEC signing for all existing and new public hosted zones, as well as DNSSEC validation for Amazon Route 53 Resolver.

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When using Amazon CloudFront to deliver your website content, visitors to your website can now access your site at the zone apex (or "root domain"). For example, your site can be accessed as example.com instead of www.example.com.

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Visitors to your website hosted on Amazon S3 can now access your site at the zone apex (or "root domain").

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Amazon Route 53 is integrated with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

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Amazon Route 53 works with the AWS Management Console. This web-based, point-and-click, graphical user interface lets you manage Amazon Route 53 without writing any code at all.

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Amazon Route 53 offers Weighted Round Robin (WRR) functionality.

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Functionality

Amazon Route 53 has a simple web-services interface that lets you get started in minutes. Your DNS records are organized into “hosted zones” that you configure with Route 53’s API. To use Route 53, you simply:

  • Subscribe to the service by clicking on the sign-up button on this page.
  • Create a hosted zone that can store DNS records for your domain. Upon creating the hosted zone, you receive four Route 53 name servers across four different Top-Level Domains (TLDs) to help ensure a high level of availability. If you don’t have a domain name, you can search for available domains and register them using the Route 53 console. If you have an existing domain name, you can opt to have it transferred to Route 53’s management so that you can conveniently manage your domain names and DNS configuration in a single location.
  • Your hosted zone will be initially populated with a basic set of DNS records, including four virtual name servers that will answer queries for your domain. You can add, delete or change records in this set using the AWS Management Console or by calling the ChangeResourceRecordSetAPI. A list of supported DNS records is available here.
  • If you want to keep your domain name with the current registrar, inform the registrar to update the name servers for your domain to the ones associated with your hosted zone. If you’ve registered a domain name with Route 53, your domain name will be automatically associated with the correct name servers.

To transfer your domain from another DNS service to Route 53, you:

  • Get a list of your DNS record data for your domain name, generally available in the form of a “zone file” that you can get from your existing DNS provider.
  • Follow the four getting started steps listed above.

By following these few simple steps, you’ll be able to set up your DNS entries and have Route 53 answering queries for your web application in just a few minutes. See our Technical Documentation for more detailed information about the Route 53 service and API.

About DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a globally distributed service that is foundational to the way people use the Internet. DNS uses a hierarchical name structure, and different levels in the hierarchy are each separated with a dot ( . ). Consider the domain names www.amazon.com and thinkwithwp.com. In both these examples, “com” is the Top-Level Domain and “amazon” the Second-Level Domain. There can be any number of lower levels (e.g., “www” and “aws”) below the Second-Level Domain. Computers use the DNS hierarchy to translate human readable names like www.amazon.com into the IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to one another.

Route 53 is an “authoritative DNS” system. An authoritative DNS system provides an update mechanism that developers use to manage their public DNS names. It then answers DNS queries, translating domain names into IP address so computers can communicate with each other.

The name for our service (Route 53) comes from the fact that DNS servers respond to queries on port 53 and provide answers that route end users to your applications on the Internet. In the future, we will add additional routing capabilities to Route 53 to better help your users find the best way to your website or application.

Working with Amazon Route 53s APIs

Route 53 provides a simple set of APIs that make it easy to create and manage DNS records for your domains. You can call these directly; all this functionality can also be accessed via the AWS Management Console. For a full list of the available Route 53 APIs, please see the Amazon Route 53 API Reference Guide. Some of the most commonly used APIs and their functionality are listed below:

  • CreateHostedZone: Creates a new hosted zone to contain your DNS data. After creating a Hosted Zone, you receive four name servers to which you can delegate your domain.
  • GetHostedZone: Lists information about a specific hosted zone.
  • DeleteHostedZone: Deletes a hosted zone.
  • ChangeResourceRecordSets: Populates and edits the DNS resource records in a hosted zone.
  • ListResourceRecordSets: Retrieves either all the resource record sets in a hosted zone or filtered by record name and type.
  • CheckAvailability: Checks the availability of one domain.
  • RegisterDomain: Registers the requested domain.

See our Technical Documentation for more detailed information about these APIs.

The Amazon Route 53 Global Network

Route 53 uses a global network of DNS servers at a series of world-wide locations to offer you high availability and increased performance. Route 53 uses the following locations:

North America

  • Atlanta, GA (ATL)
  • Boston, MA (BOS)
  • Chicago, IL (ORD)
  • Dallas/Fort Worth, TX (DFW)
  • Denver, CO (DEN)
  • Houston, TX (IAH)
  • Kansas City, KS (MCI)
  • Los Angeles, CA (LAX)
  • Miami, FL (MIA)
  • Minneapolis, MN (MSP)
  • Montreal, QC (YUL)
  • New York, NY (JFK)
  • Newark, NJ (EWR)
  • Philadelphia, PA (PHL)
  • Phoenix, AZ (PHX)
  • Pittsburgh, PA (PIT)
  • Portland, OR (HIO)
  • Querétaro, MX (QRO)
  • Salt Lake City, UT (SLC)
  • San Francisco, CA (SFO)
  • Seattle, WA (SEA)
  • Toronto, ON (YTO)
  • Vancouver, BC (YVR)
  • Washington, DC (IAD)

Europe

  • Amsterdam, Netherlands (AMS)
  • Athens, Greece (ATH)
  • Barcelona, Spain (BCN)
  • Berlin, Germany (TXL)
  • Brussels, Belgium (BRU)
  • Bucharest, Romania (OTP)
  • Budapest, Hungary (BUD)
  • Copenhagen, Denmark (CPH)
  • Dublin, Ireland (DUB)
  • Düsseldorf, Germany (DUS)
  • Frankfurt, Germany (FRA)
  • Hamburg, Germany (HAM)
  • Helsinki, Finland (HEL)
  • Lisbon, Portugal (LIS)
  • London, United Kingdom (LHR)
  • Madrid, Spain (MAD)
  • Manchester, England (MAN)
  • Marseille, France (MRS)
  • Milan, Italy (MXP)
  • Munich, Germany (MUC)
  • Oslo, Norway (OSL)
  • Paris, France (CDG)
  • Prague, Czech Republic (PRG)
  • Rome, Italy (FCO)
  • Sofia, Bulgaria (SOF)
  • Stockholm, Sweden (ARN)
  • Vienna, Austria (VIE)
  • Warsaw, Poland (WAW)
  • Zagreb, Croatia (ZAG)
  • Zurich, Switzerland (ZRH)

South America

  • Bogota, Columbia (BOG)
  • Buenos Aires, Argentina (EZE)
  • Fortaleza, Brazil (FOR)
  • Lima, Peru (LIM)
  • Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (GIG)
  • Santiago, Chile (SCL)
  • Sao Paulo, Brazil (GRU)

Asia

  • Bangkok, Thailand (BKK)
  • Bengaluru, India (BLR)
  • Chennai, India (MAA)
  • Hanoi, Vietnam (HAN)
  • Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (SGN)
  • Hong Kong, China (HKG)
  • Hyderabad, India (HYD)
  • Jakarta, Indonesia (CGK)
  • Kolkata, India (CCU)
  • Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (KUL)
  • Manila, Philippines (MNL)
  • Mumbai, India (BOM)
  • New Delhi, India (DEL)
  • Pune, India (PNQ)
  • Seoul, South Korea (ICN)
  • Singapore (SIN)
  • Taipei, Taiwan (TPE)
  • Tokyo, Japan (NRT)

Australia and New Zealand

  • Auckland, New Zealand (AKL)
  • Brisbane, Australia (BNE)
  • Melbourne, Australia (MEL)
  • Perth, Australia (PER)
  • Sydney, Australia (SYD)

Middle East and Africa

  • Cape Town, South Africa (CPT)
  • Dubai, United Arab Emirates (DXB)
  • Fujairah, United Arab Emirates (FJR)
  • Johannesburg, South Africa (JNB)
  • Lagos, Nigeria (LOS)
  • Manama, Bahrain (BAH)
  • Muscat, Oman (MCT)
  • Nairobi, Kenya (NBO)
  • Tel Aviv, Israel (TLV)

Intended Usage and Restrictions

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement.