Health Checks

AWS Route 53 health checks are a useful and powerful feature. Health checks are independent entities from resource records. While records define how to route traffic, health checks provide separate mechanisms to monitor a resource’s health. Health checks allow us to monitor endpoints’ health and availability, such as web servers, load balancers, or other endpoints. Our Route 53 records then reference these health check results to make informed routing decisions.

How health check works

The health checks in Route 53 provide us with a lot of flexibility. We can configure custom health checks based on our requirements. Health checks continuously monitor the specified endpoints by sending HTTP, TCP, or HTTPS requests to the endpoint at regular intervals. Endpoints are then classified as healthy or unhealthy based on the evaluation criteria. If an endpoint is determined to be unhealthy, Route 53 automatically redirects the traffic to healthy endpoints. Health checks are performed by a fleet of health checkers distributed globally.