What is Amazon Route 53? | Definition from TechTarget

Amazon Route 53 is a scalable domain name system (DNS) service intended to give business and developers a reliable way to direct end users to applications. This is accomplished by translating domain names (www.websitename.com) into the numeric IP addresses (123.12.3), which is how computers connect to each other.

Amazon Route 53 allows developers to manage the IP addresses, referred to as “records”, listed for domain names in the DNS phone book. Amazon Route 53 answers requests, known as “queries”, to translate domain names into their corresponding IP addresses.

Amazon Route 53 connects queries to infrastructure in AWS, like Elastic Load Balancers, and allows developers to map domain names to S3 buckets, EC2 instances and other AWS resources. It can also be used to direct developers to infrastructure outside of AWS.

Amazon Route 53 makes it possible for developers to control global traffic through an assortment of routing types which can be combined with DNS Failover which directs web traffic to a substitute location to prevent site outages, to enable a mixture of fault-tolerant, low latency architectures. These routing types include Latency Based Routing (lets developers direct end users to the AWS region that delivers the lowest latency), Geo DNS (direct end users to a certain endpoint that can be specified based on the end user’s geographic location) and Weighted Round Robin (specifies the frequency, or “weights”, DNS responses are returned to end users).

Developers can purchase and manage domain names using Domain Name Registration, and Amazon Route 53 will automatically configure DNS settings for those domains. DNS settings can be configured with the Route 53 API or with the AWS Management Console. This service can be used to arrange DNS “health checks” to monitor the health of resources and applications or to direct traffic to healthy endpoints.

To ensure added security, Amazon Route 53 can be integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), to manage permissions and credentials for every user in your AWS account.

With Amazon Route 53 users only pay for managing domains and the amount of queries the DNS service answers for each of the domains.