Introduction to Route 53
Learn the essentials of Route 53, AWS’s scalable and reliable DNS service.
Route 53
AWS Route 53 is a fully managed, highly available and scalable DNS service. It’s designed to provide an extremely reliable way to register or import domains and route end user traffic to our application servers.
Note: DNS is a service that translates human-friendly domain names like
educative.iointo numerical IP addresses that computers can understand.
Features
Let’s look at some key features of AWS Route 53.
- It’s the only AWS service that guarantees 100% uptime.
- It allows us to register new domains and import domains registered on other domain registrar platforms.
- AWS Route 53 utilizes hosted zones and records to route end user queries to the appropriate destination.
How does AWS Route 53 route traffic?
The following illustration shows a step-by-step process of how a new client can reach the web page hosted at www.educative.io.
Let’s review the steps one by one.
- Step 1: User opens a web browser, enters
www.educative.ioin the address bar, and presses “Enter.” - Step 2: The request is routed to a DNS resolver, which the users’ ISP usually manages.
- Steps 3–5: The DNS resolver chooses a Route 53 name server and forwards the request for
www.educative.io. - Step 6: Route 53 looks in the hosted zone for
educative.io, finds a corresponding record, and returns a destination IP address to the DNS resolver. - Step 7: The DNS resolver returns the destination IP address to the user.
- Step 8: The web browser sends a request to the IP address of the resource where the web application is hosted.
- Step 9: The server or resource at the destination IP address (55.97.23.128) returns the requested web page to the user.
AWS Route 53 components
AWS Route 53 utilizes hosted zones and records to direct end users to our applications.
Hosted zones
A hosted zone is a container for a group of record sets. It corresponds to a domain and ...