Amazon CloudFront vs. Amazon Route 53

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon CloudFront
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
CloudFront is the content delivery network (CDN) from Amazon Web Services.
$0.02
Amazon Route 53
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Route 53 is a Cloud Domain Name System (DNS) offered by Amazon AWS as a reliable way to route visitors to web applications and other site traffic to locations within a company's infrastructure, which can be configured to monitor the health and performance of traffic and endpoints in the network.
$0.40
Per Zone Per Month
Pricing
Amazon CloudFrontAmazon Route 53
Editions & Modules
Over 5PB
$0.02
Next 524TB
$0.03
Next 4PB
$0.03
Next 350TB
$0.04
Next 100TB
$0.06
Next 40TB
$0.08
First 10TB
$0.09
Standard
$0.40
Per Zone Per Month
Queries
$0.60
Per Million Queries
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudFrontAmazon Route 53
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon CloudFrontAmazon Route 53
Best Alternatives
Amazon CloudFrontAmazon Route 53
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Azure CDN
Azure CDN
Score 7.1 out of 10
Google Cloud DNS
Google Cloud DNS
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon CloudFrontAmazon Route 53
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon CloudFrontAmazon Route 53
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon CloudFront is best suited when there is a need of speed in serving static and dynanic web contents of a web application. If the content is already in that edge location, CloudFront delivers it immediately. If the content is not currently in that edge location, CloudFront retrieves it from an Amazon S3 bucket or an HTTP server. Amazon CloudFront is not appropriate in case users can tolerate some delays or servers are present near to the location of user. It also Integrates through the W3 Total Cache plugin. Amazon CloudFront Pricing based on bandwidth usage that's the best part of it.
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- Routing users to the closest or best-performing resources: Route 53 allows you to use geolocation and latency-based routing to route users to the resources that will give them the best performance. - Load balancing: Route 53 can be used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances or Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) tasks, to improve the availability and scalability of your application. - Managing domain names: Route 53 can be used to register domain names and manage DNS records, making it a one-stop solution for managing your domain name and routing traffic to your resources. Scenarios where Route 53 is less appropriate include:Applications with very high query rates: Route 53 is designed to handle millions of queries per second, but if your application generates an extremely high query rate, you may need to use a specialized DNS service.Applications that require very low latency: Route 53 is designed to provide low-latency DNS service, but if your application requires ultra-low latency, you may need to use a specialized DNS service or a self-hosted DNS solution.Applications that require advanced security features: Route 53 provides basic security features such as DNSSEC, but if your application requires advanced security features such as DDoS protection, you may need to use a specialized DNS service.
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Pros
  • Solid CDN services, does what it says on the tin
  • Lots of configuration options, which allow for different setups and pricing strategies
  • Lambda@Edge integration allows for really quite complex behaviours to be executed in the cloud at the edge node itself. This means there are a huge amount of possibilities for shaping and altering traffic close to the viewer.
  • Simple integration to other AWS services (e.g. S3)
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  • We can purchase our domain through Route 53 and can be hosted for cheaper prices in AWS.
  • There are many number of routing policies you can go ahead with and this will come into picture when the customer satisfaction is required at most, so choose routing policy accordingly.
  • As usual health checks are part of DNS systems, this is also provided at cheaper rates when total process is done in Route 53 service.
  • It can be used as standalone application from AWS
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Cons
  • If price is the main concern, CloudFront is not the cheapest-in-class by a wide margin
  • Some of the settings are not obvious to new users, and the management dashboards could use work
  • Lacks fine-grained access controls and statistical reports for usage
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  • Price, it is not expensive ... but you can find some cheaper and even free DNS solutions.
  • If you use non-AWS infrastructure, Route 53 doesn't have significant advantages on other services.
  • AWS Route 53 does not support forwarding or conditional forwarding options for domains used on an on-premise network.
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Usability
Easy way to integrate a CDN within the AWS infrastructure. It allows further customization based on company needs.
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You need to know what DNS is; this is a tool built for developers who already know the technology and are just looking for a DNS management tool. The tool is very usable given that. If you're not familiar with DNS, Route53 isn't really for you and you won't find it to be very usable-- you'll need to go read the documentation, and that will start with learning what DNS is
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Support Rating
CloudFront is a good CDN solution. It can be a bit complicated to implement depending on your needs, but AWS tech support is great. You get to avoid a ton of upfront costs by going with CloudFront. It works best in conjunction with other AWS services in your infrastructure. Once you set it up, you won't need to do much to maintain it. It just works.
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Until today, I have never needed support to Route53 because the documentation is great. But, I have needed it for other services. And they're near perfect always. Except that they don't have Portuguese support yet and they're sometimes slow to answer (48 hours in non-critical ones, in two tickets). But usually, they're amazing!
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Alternatives Considered
Have used the IBM Cloud Content Delivery Network for a very short time span like a couple of weeks. Both the setup as well as interactions with other services are a little complicated or not straightforward when compared to AWS. Also, IBM cloud has less number of edge locations than AWS Cloudfront.
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Cloudflare is also similar in the features to Route 53. However, since we are completely hosted on the AWS cloud, we can't use Cloudflare for configuring our internal networks, and integrating with the other services. The API based integration of AWS via Terraform is another factor that allows us to automate most of our deployments and manage them programmatically
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Return on Investment
  • RoI for using CloudFront is immense. You can use it for all your certificate management and static asset management of your websites using CloudFront.
  • It is as good or better than any other CDN provider with multi-region support across the world using AWS regions.
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  • All of our brand domain names (about 80 brands) are managed in there
  • Many non marketing or brand domains are also in there
  • There isn't any defined ROI because it's such a trivial and necessary service with impacts all business operations
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