Amazon Route 53 is a relatively new part of Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

's cloud computing

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

 platform, Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com...

 (AWS). Route 53 provides scalable and highly available

High availability

High availability is a system design approach and associated service implementation that ensures a prearranged level of operational performance will be met during a contractual measurement period....

 Domain Name Service (DNS). In addition to being able to route users to various AWS services, including EC2

EC2

EC2 or EC-2 may refer to:*Amazon EC2, or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, commercial web service that allows customers to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications...

 instances, Route 53 also enables AWS customers to route users to non-AWS infrastructure. Route 53's servers are distributed throughout the world.

Customers create "hosted zones" that act as a container for four name servers. The name servers are spread across four different TLDs

Top-level domain

A top-level domain is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last label of a...

. Customers are able to add, delete, and change any DNS records in their hosted zones. Amazon does not provide domain name registration. Amazon provides an SLA

Service Level Agreement

A service-level agreement is a part of a service contract where the level of service is formally defined. In practice, the term SLA is sometimes used to refer to the contracted delivery time or performance...

 of the service always being available at all times (100% available).

One of the key features of Route 53 is programmatic access to the service that allows customers to modify DNS records via web service calls. Combined with other features in AWS, this allows a developer to programmatically bring up a machine and point to components that have been created via other service calls such as those to create new S3

S3

-Airlines:* Santa Barbara Airlines IATA airline designator* S03, Ashland Municipal Airport FAA LID-Locomotives:* ALCO S-3, an American diesel switching locomotive* NER Class S3, a North Eastern Railway steam locomotive...

 buckets or EC2

EC2

EC2 or EC-2 may refer to:*Amazon EC2, or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, commercial web service that allows customers to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications...

instances.

Supported DNS Record Types

• A
• AAAA
• CNAME
• MX
• NS
• PTR
• SOA
• SPF
• SRV
• TXT

Additionally, there is a Route 53-specific virtual record type called "Alias" records (a Route 53-specific virtual record).

Pricing

Hosted Zones

• $0.50 per hosted zone / month for the first 25 hosted zones
• $0.10 per hosted zone / month for additional hosted zones

Queries

• $0.50 per million queries – first 1 billion queries / month
• $0.25 per million queries – over 1 billion queries / month

External links

• Amazon Route 53 main page
• Amazon Route 53 API Reference