Amazon Route 53 Introduces DNS failover

[jread]

Route 53 is becoming a viable alternative to enterprise providers UltraDNS and Dyn. Performance is solid, but features have been lacking. This is a popular feature those providers charge $100+/mo for versus $0.75/mo on Route 53. Monitoring capabilities are limited (tcp and basic http only), but for many this is probably sufficient. DNSSEC is another feature I hope they will support in the future.

A few months back I wrote a blog post on the topic of managed DNS provider comparisons (performance, market share, price, features, network size, etc.):

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis...

[boundlessdreamz]

Read that post. So http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/services/global-traffic-director/ this service is zone based and not geo-ip ?

[noinput]

Fantastic write up, I learned a few things as well! Would really like to see the updated post with CloudFlare data & anything you find with the new Route53 feature also.

[nodata]

Do you have any thoughts on Rackspace DNS (http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/dns/)? It's free.

[jeffbarr]

More details can be found in my blog post at http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/02/create-a-backup-website-u... .

[lazyant]

isn't this offering cannibalizing AWS load balancers? if I have a set of web servers with a load balancer at front and health checks that takes unhealthy nodes out of rotation, isn't it cheaper now to just use this DNS fail-over?

http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/elasticloadbalancing/ http://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/

[jread]

Not really - DNS failover is typically much slower to respond compared to load balancing because records are cached.

[dsl]

ELB is a local load balancer, distributing requests to local servers based on load and availability.

R53 is a global traffic manager, distributing requests to datacenters to provide failover and latency optimization.

[forcer]

We use DNS Made Easy but and are happy with them. However, for our level of DNS queries per month - e.g. over 50million Route 53 would give us some significant cost savings.

Do you guys know whether Route 53 offers templating mechanism? e.g. setup 1 template and apply to 50 different domains?

[jeffbarr]

The AWS templating mechanism is called CloudFormation. Here's a snippet of a Route 53 template:

( http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuid... ).

[donavanm]

No template DSL/system in the console. But there is an API with quite a few client libraries. Shouldn't be much work to whip one out. Or it may exist already, actually.

[jkat]

Would be nice to have the ability to set up some type of alert/notification.

[moe]

Does this feature use EBS to store the state?

[mslot]

No, the health check system does not have a dependency on EBS. More importantly, the health checkers are highly redundant and will continue to function even in case of multiple AZ, region, service, or Internet outages.

[kamakazizuru]

noob question - why use load balancing if DNS failover does essentially the same thing?

[jread]

DNS failover is subject to DNS caching and TTL. Load balancing is real time. A DNS driven failover may take 1-10 minutes to trigger versus instantaneous for load balancing. Good approach to failover is a combination of both.

[ksec]

Route 53 is slow ( For a paid solution ). At least when i tested it. It you are doing to use a Third Party DNS that you paid you are either going with the best ones or ones that are good enough like OnApp Anycast DNS.

[sandfox]

Define slow? Which particular aspect?

[gtaylor]

We have found quite the opposite. Route 53 has been very responsive for us all around the world. Also, Route 53 has Anycast support.

[saurik]

Recommendations for "best"?