Amazon Route 53 is the DNS service of Amazon Web Services. It hosts DNS zones, answers queries from a global network of authoritative servers, and can also register domains and run health checks. The name refers to port 53, the standard DNS port.
Why it matters
Route 53 is often the DNS provider for sites running on AWS. Besides ordinary records, it offers routing policies: weighted, latency-based, geolocation and failover. Combined with health checks, these let DNS steer users away from an unhealthy endpoint. Its alias records can point an apex domain at AWS resources such as load balancers or CloudFront, which a plain CNAME cannot do at the zone apex.
Example
A failover setup uses two records for www.example.com:
www A PRIMARY -> 203.0.113.10 (health check attached)
www A SECONDARY -> 198.51.100.20If the health check on the primary fails, Route 53 begins answering with the secondary address.
Common mistakes
- Using a long TTL on failover records, so resolvers keep the dead address cached.
- Changing nameservers at the registrar without copying all existing records first.
- Creating a new hosted zone and assuming its nameservers match an earlier zone of the same name; each zone gets its own set.
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