Amazon Route 53 - A New DNS Service from AWS

[RyanGWU82]

Very interesting. We currently use DNS Made Easy but I see two huge advantages to Route 53:

1. It's API-driven, so we can modify our DNS entries programmatically. You can't do that with DNS Made Easy. (They've been "planning to implement an API in the future" for a long time now.)

2. At our scale, it's exactly 1/4th the cost of DNS Made Easy. That'll be a nice chunk of change. Plus, like other AWS services, you only pay for the number of queries that you actually use.

[plusbryan]

Even more important, you won't need to solve that pesky captcha each time you wish to log in!

[js2]

Ditto. We're making use of DME dynamic DNS updates, but it's no substitute for a real API. I'd like to be able to add/remove A records, not just adjust the IP's of existing records, which is all you can currently do with DME.

The reason I do this is so I can have the root of a zone pointed at an ELB, since you can't use a CNAME for that. So I mirror the IP address(es) of the ELB into the zone root. With DME, I rotate the IP every few minutes, but with Route 53 I could publish all its IPs. (Of course, it would be nice if Route 53 was integrated with Amazon's other services so I didn't have to do this at all…)

[eli]

Yup, same here. DME additional query & overage fees are killing me.

Has anyone tried this out though? My impression is that R53 is exclusively API driven, at least for now. I'd kinda like to have a web interface to fall back on.

[TomOfTTB]

As someone who uses Nettica for Dynamaic DNS (which this seems to be targeting) I think it's great that Amazon is creating some competition in this area. Not enough web developers consider Dynamic, programmable DNS and that's a shame because I think it's a must. I monitor every site I have from an external location and if there's ever a host outage I have the DNS re-routed to a backup host within 10 minutes (it doesn't always propagate as quickly as I like but there's little that can be done about that)

I'm happy with Nettica but Amazon's offering will draw attention to this important point. Plus competition leads to more features, better service and so on.

[jrockway]

What do you set your TTL to? Do caches actually respect it?

(My experience with this is that the downtime that I want to route around usually lasts longer than the TTL. And even if it doesn't, the recursive resolver / OS cache / browser cache ends up persisting the record longer than the TTL advises.)

[jacquesm]

Amazon got a lot less interesting in the last couple of weeks, I hear they will take down your site without so much as a warrant.

[tptacek]

Thank you, Jacques. Nobody else was thinking that. Very insightful. Much better that we talk about Wikileaks... again... than discuss a programmable dynamic DNS service run by one of the largest tech companies on the Internet.

[cmelbye]

They have a Terms of Service, and like (literally) every hosting provider on the planet, they will take down your site if you violate the agreement that you agreed to when you signed up.

[jdp23]

Totally agreed. Using Amazon services for anything that involves content that could potentially offend the government of any country looks pretty risky right about now.

[OzzyB]

This timing of this is indeed quite ironic.

[tomstuart]

Here's hoping that this is the first step towards making ELB actually usable -- i.e. dropping the requirement that you must point a CNAME at the ELB hostname, which prevents you from using a zone's root record (you can balance www.foo.com but not foo.com). To wit:

In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name

As demonstrated by https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=32044, lots of people want this.

[rosejn]

Routing traffic to wikileaks would have been a perfect demonstration of this new system. Instead they decided to show how much they respect freedom of speech.

And tptacek, yes we should speak about wikileaks when discussing Amazon, from now on. This isn't a fanboy site, this is a place to discuss the real ramifications of a company's actions.

[619Cloud]

Does anybody else think $1/Mo a zone/domain is high? Sure its nice that a million queries is only going to run you $0.50, but I suspect most people have a lot of domains, but little queries. Makes sense if you have a single domain, that gets a boat load of DNS requests, but if you have a lot of domains, with very little requests, its not cost effective.

[8ig8]

I was thinking the same thing upon first inspection. We have about 200 domains with DNS Made Easy. We don't even get close to the allotted queries for the account. I think we pay about $180 per year for all 200.

I'll need to read up on this a bit more. It does appear to be significantly more economical to stay with DNS/ME.

[jeffreymcmanus]

The DNS hosting service we used in the past charged us $13.95/year per zone.

Slicehost doesn't charge you anything for DNS hosting if you use them for some kind of VPS hosting. We use their DNS for our (dev and staging) servers that aren't even hosted on Slicehost and it doesn't seem to be a problem. It's the one reason why we continue to keep a few of our VPS servers hosted there since competitors such as Linode are so much cheaper now.

[grandalf]

It's very high. Slicehost offers the service free!

[eli]

Dns Made Easy is $1.95 per zone beyond what's included in your plan.

[there]

if anyone is wondering about the name, 53 is the port that dns operates over.

[mleonhard]

It's an unfortunate name choice since '53' looks so similar to 'S3'.

[mgkimsal]

There's no mention of IPv6 support. Given the situation that IPv4 addresses will be running out shortly, it'd be nice to see some acknowledgment of forward-thinking IPv6 plans.

edit: sorry to be so out of step - I guess I should have tied wikileaks to ipv6 to fit in with the rest of the comments.

[francoisdevlin]

The FAQ says they support AAAA

http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/

[kmfrk]

Say what you want about the whole Wikileaks affair, but regardless of where you stand, Amazon's sense of timing seems really bad. Couldn't they at least have waited a week after they declined to host Wikileaks?

People will undoubtedly tie the two things together, and Wikileaks supporters will make a big effort to point out Amazon's recent misstep.

I would probably have waited just a couple of days or weeks before this recent event was out of most people's minds.

[jgreen10]

No such thing as bad publicity. Seriously, I don't think Amazon will even notice the tiniest drop in sales, that's just not how it works.

[kahawe]

I would say it perfectly displays what wikileaks was for them: just another regular client and they are not going to bend over just for one "small fish", no matter how beloved and important this one fish is amongst the tech savvy crowd.

[rmoriz]

If you like AWS or not: It's not a good idea to have everything in one account.

It's a single point of failiure anway and you want to distribute your core infrastructure between different parties. It's cool to run a DNS by AWS but not cool if you don't have mirrors/secondary nameservers, too.

[chrismiller]

I hope they eventually build in the ability to do location based DNS load balancing. For me that would be a killer feature.

[gfodor]

A big reason this is important is that it's a stepping stone to location based DNS routing. That'd be the very last showstopper for some deployments being exclusively AWS.

[eli]

"In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name, and the ability to route your customers to the closest EC2 region."

[WALoeIII]

This combined with the recently rolled out SSL termination in the Elastic Load Balancer product (http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/10/elastic-load-balancer-sup...) makes supporting custom domains a cinch.

[j_baker]

"It is designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other."

Maybe this isn't a big deal, but wouldn't someone who needs a DNS service either already know this or have a developer or IT guy who has explained to them why they need a DNS service?

[jacquesm]

I'd like to see how far you get on the public portion of the internet with a 192.x.x.x anyway.

[snissn]

Amazon should add a feature for geographic load balancing that could compliment their aws locations

[eli]

I believe that was in the email announced under planned features for the future.

[nikcub]

Great, so now they can also switch off your DNS if they don't like what you are hosting.

[sramov]

  DJ Bernstein TinyDNS 1.05

Anycast djbdns, nice :)

[smountcastle]

Did you use fpdns (http://code.google.com/p/fpdns/) to finger-print Amazon's service? If so, I've never heard good things about djbdns :( NSD (http://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/nsd/) seems to be the new hotness as far as authoritative DNS servers go.

[wwortiz]

Can anyone explain what this hosted zone part is, I must be too sleepy or am just missing what it is.

[zbailey]

I believe a hosted zone simply corresponds to a single domain you want to host the DNS for.

If you've ever ran your own DNS server this would be equivalent to a "zone file": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_file

[nphase]

I take it Wikileaks won't be using this as their DNS provider.

[TomOfTTB]

Oh for God's sakes let it be. If you want to boycott Amazon then Fine. Do it. No one's stopping you. But don't spam other threads with your political views.

[shykes]

We're very happy Zerigo DNS customers. Great API, great infrastructure, great support.

[pquerna]

Us too, Zerigo has been awesome, and is already API driven :)