
Amazon Route 53 Introduces DNS failover - shirkey
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/health-checks.html
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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...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis-of-
managed-dns.html)

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

~~~
jread
Correct - it is based on the IP anycast endpoint a resolver connects to, not
the geo data associated with the resolver's IP.

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jeffbarr
More details can be found in my blog post at
[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/02/create-a-backup-
website-u...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/02/create-a-backup-website-
using-route-53-dns-failover-and-s3-website-hosting.html) .

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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.

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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...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/quickref-
route53.html) ).

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

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moe
Does this feature use EBS to store the state?

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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saurik
Recommendations for "best"?

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taligent
I personally have always liked DNS Made Easy.

Affordable, always in the top 3 for speed and lots of features.

