Amazon Route 53

Score9.7 out of 10

62 Reviews and Ratings

What is Amazon Route 53?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Managed DNS

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Amazon Route 53 as our primary DNS and traffic management service to ensure high availability, scalability, and low latency access to our web and cloud-based applications.

Pros

High availability and maximum uptime & fault tolerance
Global performance optimization using latency based routing
scalability as Amazon Route 53 can auto scale to handle increased DNS queries

Cons

Limited real time statistics and monioring
Complex configuration for advanced routing polices
Limited integration with On-premises infra

Return on Investment

Services/Application response time improved by 28-30%
Automated fallback to DR helped in maximizing uptime.
Unable to integrated advanced features with on-prem infra

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Azure DNS

Other Software Used

Azure DNS

Piyush Goel View profile

Senior Vice President - Engineering in Engineering at Capillary Technologies (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use AWS Route 53 as the DNS management solution for ~12 years. We have over 800+ domain entries being managed over there. These include the tools as below:

API Endpoints that process over 100M API calls a day.
Web-Portal for configuration management used by 20K business users.
Web-hooks exposed to the external world for sending DLR notifications for the marketing messages that we send out (>100M messages per day).

Pros

Uptime - Route53 is highly performant and available. We have had only 3-4 instances in the last 12 years when we had any downtime or outages due to Route53.
Extensive API layer on Route53 that allows integration with external tools and SDK's (Boto, Terraform, etc)
Closely integrated with the other AWS services. Makes it easy to operate the infra.

Cons

Importing external Zone files is tricky. Takes a bit of time to figure.
UI is a little slow to load when the number of entries are high (>100)
Can give tag based search feature to make it easier to look for the relevant entries.
Some common features like Logging, Health Checks can be expensive.

Most Important Features

Availability - we need very high availability given the enterprise customers we work with.
API Access - gives us a high degree of programmatic access and integration with Terraform.
Integration with the other AWS services, and ability to manage internal and external networks from a single console.

Return on Investment

High uptime lead to stable infrastructure and hence a higher customer NPS.
By configuring the right network topologies internally we can build a highly secure network.
The global presence and POP's allow us to serve traffic from 30+ countries with low latencies.

Alternatives Considered

Cloudflare

Other Software Used

New Relic, Cloudflare, Cloudflare Zero Trust Services

Jeeva Kumar View profile

Information System Manager in Information Technology at ZeOmega (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am using amazon rote 53 as a delegated Nameserver from my primary DNS server. This is acting as a backup DNS incase if the primary goes down

Pros

high availability
easy to generate the hit count report
uptime

Cons

it took time initially to setup the synchronization from my primary DNS to route 53
cost is based on the usage/hit count

Most Important Features

High availability
backup
cost effective

Return on Investment

when our primary DNS provider went down, aws served as a backup and thus minimized the business impact
its working great for more than 7-8 years which is great

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Umbrella

Rekha Yadav View profile

Development Team Lead in Information Technology at Accenture (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon Web Service (AWS) Route 53 offers seamless Domain Name Services Offering , Route53 was used to register company domains in the cloud so that cloud based workloads such as EC2 instance and Applications can be integrated and joined with customer domains. For certain applications route 53 DNS was used to control the traffic across different regions.

Pros

Allow application traffic between different regions
extending domain name services from on-prem to cloud
DNS firewall to allow/reject traffic

Cons

Cross account DNS service is not available
DNS resolution between VNET
Limited visibility from observability point of view

Most Important Features

Domain Integration
Cross Region Traffic/Application Communication/Data Transfer
DNS firewall

Return on Investment

High Available DNS service
Cross Account DNS service is not possible
Cross region/Filter based traffic routing

Alternatives Considered

Google Cloud DNS, Azure DNS and IBM Domain Name Services (DNS)

Other Software Used

Google Cloud DNS, Azure DNS, IBM Domain Name Services (DNS)

Rajat Seth View profile

Senior Data Scientist in Information Technology at Intuit (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon Route 53 has a simple UI with everything you need right in front of you. When you add a new record, the response time is super fast. Support for elastic DNS is also fantastic, as setting anything like that up manually requires knowledge, whereas Route53 provides it ready-made availability.

Pros

Super fast DNS server.
Quick setup.
Large API Library.

Cons

Needed bit easy documentation.
GUI could be better with more themes.

Most Important Features

Cloud DNS management.
Cloud Hosting.
Domain Registration.

Return on Investment

Highly affordable and cost effective.
We get domain registration under same account.
Reduces workload.

Alternatives Considered

Google Domains, Cloudflare and GoDaddy

Other Software Used

Google Domains, Cloudflare, GoDaddy