Amazon Route 53 - The AWS Domain Name Service

In 1995 I registered my first domain name and put it online. Back then, registration was expensive and complex. Before you could even register a domain you had to convince at least two of your friends to host the Domain Name Service (DNS) records for it. These days, domain registration is inexpensive and simple. DNS hosting has also been simplified, but it is still a human-powered forms-based process.

Today we are introducing Amazon Route 53, a programmable Domain Name Service. You can now create, modify, and delete DNS zone files for any domain that you own. You can do all of this under full program control—you can easily add and modify DNS entries in response to changing circumstances. For example, you could create a new sub-domain for each new customer of a Software as a Service (SaaS) application. DNS queries for information within your domains will be routed to a global network of 16 edge locations tuned for high availability and high performance.

Route 53 introduces a new concept called a Hosted Zone. A Hosted Zone is equivalent to a DNS zone file. It begins with the customary SOA (Start of Authority) record and can contain other records such as A (IPV4 address), AAAA (IPV6 address), CNAME (canonical name), MX (mail exchanger), NS (name server), and SPF (Sender Policy Framework). You have full control over the set of records in each Hosted Zone.

You start out by creating a new Hosted Zone for a domain. The new zone will contain one SOA record and four NS records. Then you can post batches of changes (additions, deletions, and alterations) to the Hosted Zone. You'll get back a change id for each batch. You can poll Route 53 to verify that the changes in the batch (as identified by the change id) have been propagated to all of the name servers (this typically takes place within 60 seconds).

The zone's status will change from PENDING to INSYNC when all of the changes have been propagated. You can update your domain registration with the new nameservers at this point. Our Route 53 Getting Started Guide contains a complete guide to getting started with a new Hosted Zone.

Each record in a Hosted Zone can refer to AWS or non-AWS resources as desired. This means that you can use Route 53 to provide DNS services for any desired combination of traditional and cloud-based resources, and that you can switch back and forth quickly and easily.

You can access Route 53 using a small set of REST APIs. Toolkit and AWS Management Console support is on the drawing board, as is support for the so-called "Zone Apex" issue.

Route 53 will cost you $1 per month per Hosted Zone, $0.50 per million queries for the first billion queries per month, and $0.25 per million queries after that.  Most sites typically see an order of magnitude fewer DNS queries than page views. If your site gets one million page views per month, it would be reasonable to expect about 100,000 DNS queries per month. In other words, one billion queries is a lot of queries and many sites won’t come anywhere near this number. The results of a DNS query are cached by clients. You could set a high TTL (Time to Live) on the records in your Hosted Zone in order to reduce the number of queries and the cost.

Route 53 supports up to 100 Hosted Zones per AWS account. If you need more, simply contact us and we'll be happy to help.

The Route 53 / CloudFront team has openings for several software developers and a senior development manager.

-- Jeff;

 

 

Comments

[Fred Janon]

> For example, you could create a new sub-domain for each new customer of a Software as a Service (SaaS) application

Excellent!

[Basit Mustafa]

How do you set MX records? Documentation is pretty mute on this...setting Type element to MX, Value to ### mxhost. , but the validation engine doesn't like that I haven't included a Name element...what goes here? It's an MX record, it doesn't resolve to a name...but it won't take junk/empty element...

[M. David Peterson]

Dear Jeff: The LOVE in my heart right now... [thump,thump... thump, thump...] I can not describe it words which you of all people knows is saying a lot.

YES!!!!! This is exactly what we've been waiting for. Gracias, my friend and to the rest of my friends@AWS!

[E.T.Cook]

Why would you create a subdomain for each of your SaaS customers, and not just use a wildcard?

[Ted]

That's definitely a nice service, but in my opinion slightly overpriced. Most traditional domain wholesalers have DNS with API access included in the registration fee of the domain. While 12 $ per year for a domain might seem not much, it's 100% on top of the domain price of around 12 $ per year.

Besides the pricing issue, I'd love to switch all of our domains to your new AWS DNS. Any plans for lower pricing for many domains? Or maybe even something like a "reserved instance" pricing or flat free pricing for say 100/500/1000/5000/10000 domains?

[Maciej Wiercinski]

Seems to be great, especially compared to DynDNS' Custom product, more value for less money and more scalable as well. Nothing on geographical anycast though.

[Jeff Barr]

E.T., a wildcard domain wouldn't work if the subdomains were to be routed to more than one EC2 instance.

[Jeff Barr]

Hi Basit, here's an AWS Forum thread with the necessary info: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=55992&tstart=0 .

[Chris Cera]

I know a ton of time and debate goes into naming a product or service, but I think "53" is too visually similar to "S3" and will cause confusion. I would consider dropping this name long-term and just calling it "Amazon DNS" or similar. My $0.02.

[Niall]

I agree about the naming. Why was it called Route 53? Whats the significance of that?

[Dbrock]

I agree with Ted. I would love to use this service, but it’s going to be too expensive for us. We have many low-traffic domains, and the $1/month/domain unfortunately is going to add up to too much.

[Oliver]

Id love this new service however intergration into the AWS Console with an easy UI, would be awesome, compeitors provide a nice web UI, it seems this service requires more XML hardcoding, for someone who prefers web UIs, an additon of a Web UI in the mangement console would be awesome!.

[George]

Is it $1month/hosted zone (could be many domains) or $1 month/domain?

[John Alessi]

The significance of the Route 53 name is that DNS normally uses port 53 for network communications.

[Thomas Bodetti]

This is really interesting, I understand most of how this works, but I sort of do not understand how to setup the service, looks like a command line tool or something like that, sort of confusing, but interesting.

[Pchaganti]

Complete management for Route 53 - http://blog.ylastic.com/route53-dns-management

[udit]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks jeff! it is really well described for amazon route 53. I am one of the developer of DNS30 - web based user interface for Amazon route 53.

http://www.dns30.com