When you type google.com into your browser, how does your computer find Google's servers? This is accomplished using the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS is the service that translates human-friendly domain names into computer-friendly IP addresses.
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Why do we prefer using names like google.com instead of a series of numbers?
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud DNS web service. It's designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to internet applications.
It's named after the famous Route 66 highway, but uses port 53, which is the standard port for DNS.
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What do you think makes Route 53 different from traditional DNS services?
At its core, Route 53 performs domain registration and DNS routing. You can register new domain names directly with Route 53. Once you have a domain, you create records that tell DNS where to send traffic for that domain, for example, to the IP address of your web server.
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What happens if a DNS record points to the wrong IP address?
A key feature of Route 53 is health checks. Route 53 can monitor the health and performance of your application's servers. If a server becomes unhealthy or unreachable, Route 53 can detect this and stop sending traffic to it.
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How does this prevent a bad experience for your users?
Based on these health checks, Route 53 can perform DNS failover. If your primary server becomes unhealthy, Route 53 can automatically start routing all your traffic to a healthy backup server, perhaps in a different Availability Zone or Region.
