How To Create Amazon Route 53

In the dynamic landscape of cloud computing, efficient and reliable domain name system (DNS) management is crucial for the seamless operation of web applications and services. One powerful solution at the forefront of DNS services is Amazon Route 53. As a scalable and highly available cloud-based domain registration and routing service, Route 53 plays a pivotal role in ensuring the accessibility, performance, and resilience of your web infrastructure.

What is Amazon Route 53?

Amazon Route 53 is not just a catchy name — it refers to the 53rd port, traditionally assigned to DNS. Route 53 is the DNS service provided by AWS. Route 53 is one of the most well-known, reliable, and cost-effective services for managing domains. Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS). This AWS service provides scalable and highly available domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking for your applications. Whether you’re launching a new website, configuring subdomains, or optimizing the performance of your web applications, Route 53 has got you covered.

Some Amazon Route 53 useful terminology:

Domain: Domains are your standard URLs like amazon.com and google.com.

Subdomains: Subdomains are a unique URL that lives on your purchased domain as an extension in front of your regular domain like www.google.com and docs.google.com.

Hosted Zone: It’s the way AWS describes the information you provide to define how traffic aimed at your domain name will be managed. A hosted zone is a container for records, and records contain information about how you want to route traffic for a specific domain, such as example.com, and its subdomains (web.example.com, admin.example.com). A hosted zone and the corresponding domain have the same name. When we create a public-hosted zone, it automatically creates an SOA and NS that are unique to each hosted zone.

DNS Records: DNS records are what contain the actual information that other browsers or services need to interact with, like your server’s IP address. Nameservers, on the other hand, help store and organize those individual DNS records. Nameservers are the physical phone book itself and DNS records are the individual entries in the phone book.

Start of authority (SOA): It contains info of hosted zones. The type of resource record that every DNS must begin with, contains the following information:

1. Contains the owner’s info (email id).
2. Contains info of the authoritative server.
3. Serial number which is incremented with changes to the data zones. (In case of updates).
4. Stores the name of the server supplying the data.
5. Stores the admin zone.
6. Current version of the data file.
7. Time to live.

Name Server (NS) records: As discussed earlier it is a physical phone book itself. Nameservers play an important role in connecting a URL with a server IP address in a much more human-friendly way. Nameservers look like any other domain name. When you look at a website’s nameservers, you’ll typically see a minimum of two nameservers (though you can use more). Here’s an example of what they look like:

ns-380.awsdns-47.com
Ns-1076.awsdns-06.org

They are used by top-level domain servers to direct traffic to the content DNS server. It specifies which DNS server is authoritative for a domain. It is of 4 types Recursive resolvers, root nameservers, TLD nameservers, and authoritative nameservers.

Time To Live (TTL):Length of time the DNS record is cached on the server in seconds. The default is 48 hours.

Canonical Name (CNAME): A CNAME, or Canonical Name record, is a record that points to another domain address rather than an IP address. For example, say you have several subdomains, like www.mydomain.com, mail.mydomain.com etc and you want these subdomains to point to your main domain name mydomain.com.

Alias Record: You will use an ALIAS record when you want the domain itself (not a subdomain) to “point” to a hostname. The ALIAS record is similar to a CNAME record, which is used to point subdomains to a hostname. The CNAME record only can be used for subdomains, so the ALIAS record fills this gap. Ex: @ 10800 IN ALIAS example.example.com. Please note the final dot (.) at the end is necessary for the record to work correctly.

REGISTER A NEW DOMAIN NAME IN ROUTE 53

One of the initial steps in establishing your online presence is securing a memorable and relevant domain name. With Amazon Route 53, this process becomes a breeze. Let’s see the steps.

Right away, go to the management console, type route 53 in the search box, and select route 53 under services.

In the route 53, dash-board, first we have to check whether that domain name is available. So, under register domain, type the domain name, I call it viktechsolutions.com. Once you’ve typed your domain name, click checkout.

If the domain name you are trying to register is available, select it. I try to register viktechsolutions.com, and it is available, so I will select it. Then on the right side of the register domain navigation pane, a list of the selected domain you want to register and the price tag will appear then click proceed to checkout.

You will then be brought to a new page where you need to enter your contact information. Fill in your details. Under privacy protection, make sure it’s enabled to hide your contact details, and then click next.

On this page review your contact information, tick the box on “terms and conditions” and then click submit.

This is all we need to do to register a domain name.

The domain name can take up to 3 days to be complete. For me, it took about 20 minutes. Now it is available for use.

Types of Routing policies:

Simple Routing policy.

This is the default Routing Policy. This routing policy randomly selects the routing path and does not take the resource status (health) into account. It can be used across regions.

Failover Routing

It allows us route traffic to a resource when the resource is healthy or to a different resource when the first resource is unhealthy. We can associate health checks with this type of policy.

Latency Routing Policy

It is mainly used when we need a website to be installed or is being hosted in multiple AWS regions. It redirects to the server that has the least latency close to us also helpful when the latency of users is a priority, to improve performance due to the support of the demands of the WORLD region, with a time delay. The response to the request is purely measured by latency and not by the distance to the region of the resource.

Weighted Routing

This routes multiple sources to a single name and controls the percentage % of the requests that go to a specific endpoint. This approach is heavily used in Blue/Green Deployment, where you can release a software product from the dev stage to live production. Depending on your requirements, we can switch the traffic to one of the endpoints at any given point.

Geo Location Routing Policy

Geolocation routing policy refers to the practice of directing network traffic based on the geographical location of the user or the destination server. This approach is often employed by organizations to optimize the performance and efficiency of their network services.

Multi-Value Routing Policy

Unlike Simple Routing Policy, where we can specify multiple IP addresses for a single “A” record set, with multi-value routing policy we can create multiple “A” record sets for each IP address that we want to define. With this approach, we can monitor each endpoint better than the simple routing policy by having a health check attached to each record set.

This brings us to the end of this blog. Stay tuned for more.

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