AWS Route 53
By Amazon Web Services
AWS Route 53 is Amazon Web Services' scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service, used for domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking, named after TCP/UDP port 53 which DNS servers use.
Definition
AWS Route 53 is Amazon Web Services' scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service, used for domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking, named after TCP/UDP port 53 which DNS servers use.
Overview
Route 53, launched in 2010, handles two related but distinct jobs within AWS: domain name registration, and DNS hosting/routing for domains regardless of where they were registered. As a DNS service, it translates human-readable domain names into the IP addresses or service endpoints (such as an AWS CloudFront distribution or a load balancer) that requests should actually be routed to. What distinguishes Route 53 from a basic DNS host is its set of routing policies beyond simple A/CNAME records: latency-based routing sends users to the region that responds fastest for them, geolocation and geoproximity routing route based on where a request originates, weighted routing splits traffic by percentage across multiple targets (useful for gradual rollouts or A/B testing), and failover routing automatically redirects traffic away from unhealthy endpoints using Route 53's built-in health checks. Because it sits at the DNS layer, Route 53 is often one of the first services configured in an AWS architecture, resolving a domain to services like CloudFront, Elastic Load Balancing, or S3 static website hosting, and it's a core topic in most AWS Solutions Architect preparation.
Key Features
- Domain registration alongside DNS hosting and routing
- Multiple routing policies: simple, weighted, latency-based, geolocation, and failover
- Built-in health checks to automatically reroute traffic from unhealthy endpoints
- Alias records that route directly to AWS resources like CloudFront or ELB
- Highly available, globally distributed authoritative DNS infrastructure
- Traffic flow visual editor for complex routing configurations
- DNSSEC support for domain signing and validation
- Integration with AWS IAM for access control over DNS records