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
AWS WAF
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Web Services offers AWS WAF (web application firewall) to protect web applications from malicious behavior that might impede the applications functioning and performance, with customizable rules to prevent known harmful behaviors and an API for creating and deploying web security rules.
- 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.
AWS WAF is highly appropriate to interrupt or prevent cyber attacks because when implementing rules, whether they are specific or centralized, so any application that has these vulnerabilities is protected.
Implementing managed rules creates greater security to protect both API and applications. If implemented along with other AWS tools, the security is much better, so if you want to protect applications against more specific attacks, it is ideal to integrate with Amazon CloudFront, which is a great benefit because it warns when thresholds are exceeded or specific attacks occur. AWS WAF is ideal to avoid common web attacks. For more specific attacks and scenarios, I don't recommend this.
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.
AWS WAF has the most developer-friendly API to create firewall rules.
AWS WAF provides OWASP security controls, which reduces developers' burden (i.e., SQL injection and cross-site scripting).
AWS WAF has customizable web security rules. The user can even push the rules through the API available, which is the great feature and helped me a lot.
It protects applications at layer 7 (HTTP) of the OSI model and not just layer 4 (TCP).
We have been using AWS WAF for the past 3 years in front of our websites. We find it useful in preventing data crawling, DDOS attacks, etc on our websites, and hence we are going to use it in the future as well. AWS WAF is one of the best Firewalls in business.
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
The product is highly scalable. It is easy to configure the rules and thereby helps us to mitigate many vulnerabilities. The interface and programming of the firewall provisions were easy to setup. Amazon clearly spent a lot of time figuring this out and perfecting it. It allows users to do customized configurations based on their needs. It provides protection against a number of security issues like XSS, SQL injection, etc. I would definitely recommend this for protecting your infra as you scale, since this basically protects and filters all requests hitting your application server.
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!
If you're intending to use AWS WAF, I would say that you absolutely should sign up for support. AWS Support is excellent and they can help you in a really good way to solve your issues.
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
Easy of use. Setup and configuration is fairly quick. There are the usual advantages of it being a cloud solution where you can buy into the solution, configure it and set it up and get it up and running. If you are already a subscriber to AWS, having a native service has its advantages.
