amazon route 53 - webinar presentation 9.16.2015

Amazon Route 53

Improve your availability and application performance at lower cost with Amazon Route 53

Alex Corley, Senior Solutions Architect, AWS

© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

What is Amazon Route 53?Amazon Route 53 is AWS’s authoritative Domain Name System service.

DNS is a Tier-0 service – availability is most important.

No pre-warm up required – handles unpredictable traffic.

Pay as you go pricing – only pay for the resources you use.


Use Case:State of Arizona

The State of Arizona consists of more than 130 federated government agencies and 32,000 employees, which serve more than 6 million residents.

Prior to considering a migration to AWS, they ran their infrastructure on premises.• They had over 2,600 servers – 53% of which were older than 5 years.

• They had 1 central DNS server with 300 different zones, and over 6,000 records.

All applications and all traffic routed through a single central server.

They began looking at Amazon Route 53 after experiencing a failure of their DNS server, and with no backup, they were out of service until the issue was resolved.

By using Amazon Route 53, the State now saves 75% in annual operating costs on its DNS solution when compared to previous on-premises IT infrastructure.


Use Case:Newsweek

Newsweek previously had their DNS managed through a co-location, and knew that migrating would reduce their operating expenses significantly.

Newsweek initially began looking at AWS in 2009 as they were looking for cost-saving opportunities. Decided on AWS due to its comprehensive list of services that met their demands.

They adopted Amazon Route 53 for DNS management and saw savings of 93%.

“We were able to reduce our DNS costs by ninety-three percent, which in tandem allowed us to shorten our time-to-live (TTLs) for easier, timelier management of DNS records. In the cloud, IP addresses are largely ephemeral, so we needed a service that would allow us to increase the amount of DNS requests due to a shorter TTL without increasing our spend.”

- Nathan Butler, Newsweek


How it Works

UsersDNS

Resolver Amazon Route 53

Where is www.example.com?

I don’t know – I’ll ask the authority

1.2.3.4 1.2.3.4

53

DNS translates domain names into IP addresses to route traffic to websites.


Use Case:NASA JPL

Mars Curiosity Rover

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used AWS to stream the images and video associated with Curiosity’s landing.

Using cloud computing enabled JPL to provision capacity rapidly and leverage the AWS cloud to deliver successfully engaging experiences of Mars to the public.

They used Amazon Route 53 Weighted Round Robin to provide a weighted traffic distribution across ELBs

They used Amazon Route 53 for both live video streaming and for overall web architecture.


Amazon Route 53 Design Principles

Reliable

Fast

Integrated with AWS

Easy to Use

Cost Effective

Flexible

• Redundant locations• Backed with SLA

• Worldwide Anycast network• Fast propagation of changes

• ELB-Alias Queries• Latency Based Routing• More to come

• Console• Programmatic API• Domain name management

• Inexpensive rates• Pay as you go model

• Geo DNS• Weighted Round Robin• Self-Aliasing


Amazon Route 53’s Key Features

High Availability

DNS

Health Checks and Failover

Domain Name Registration

Advanced Routing: Geo

DNS, LBR, and WRR

Alias Records to AWS

Resources

Private DNS


Key Features:High Availability DNS

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS web service.

Designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications.

Amazon Route 53 can handle spikes in traffic volume without requiring any warming up of servers.

Use advanced routing policies along with health checks and failovers to ensure your application is always available to end users, and provides the best experience.


Use Case:WOW air

WOW air is an Icelandic low-cost airline.

WOW air uses Amazon Route 53 to direct users coming from its 135 domains to the appropriate web services.

WOW air regularly deploys new servers, and in the past would have to set it up from scratch, in some cases taking them days. Today the entire process of launching servers and creating new records that point to those servers takes them under 10 minutes.

One of the biggest benefits they’ve seen is the ability to increase their IT infrastructure without absorbing any of the up-front costs.

“Since going live in AWS, we’ve increased our IT infrastructure by around 40 percent. The only way we could have achieved that in the old environment would have been investing in hardware, which takes several years to pay off. As our VMware hosts were getting old, we also saw the long-term benefits in migrating to the cloud rather than reinvesting in hardware and renewing software licenses.”

By avoiding licensing and hardware costs Thorvaldsson estimates that WOW air has saved between $30,000 and $45,000.


Key Features:Health Checks

Amazon Route 53 health checks monitor the health and performance of your web applications, web servers, and other resources to help detect outages or problems with your websites or applications.

• You can configure health checks for various resources such as EC2 instances, RDS instances, S3 buckets, as well as other AWS resources.

• You can also configure health checks for non-AWS resources and endpoints.

When creating a health check, you will be able to specify the interval at which you want Amazon Route 53 to send automated requests over the Internet to your application, or other resources to verify that it’s reachable, available and functional.



Once enabled, Health Check agents will monitor each end-point of your application to determine its availability, returning a status of “healthy” or “unhealthy.

Health Checks can be used to simulate requests similar to those made by end users.

You can configure a CloudWatch alarm for each health check to receive a notification when a resource is determined to be unhealthy.

If a failover is configured, and the agents determine the endpoint to be unhealthy, Amazon Route 53 will redirect your end users to pre-determined alternate end-points that are functioning properly.



Two new health check features launched September 2015:

Calculated Health Checks let you combine the results of multiple Amazon Route 53 health checks into a single value using common operations such as AND, OR, and NOT.

• You can use calculated health checks with Amazon Route 53’s DNS failover to help improve the availability of your entire application.

• Like Amazon Route 53’s other health check varieties, calculated health checks are integrated with Amazon CloudWatch to provide metrics, graphs, and configurable alarms.

Latency Measurement Health Checks let you measure the performance of your application in addition to its availability.

• When you enable this optional feature, Amazon Route 53 provides additional Amazon CloudWatch metrics for connection time and response latency from each of the AWS regions where Amazon Route 53 conducts health checks.

• You can configure alarms on these Amazon CloudWatch metrics in order to be notified if your application becomes slow to respond to customer requests.


Key Features:DNS Failover

You can configure a failover record that is tied to your health check.

If the health check returns a status of healthy, your application will continue to function as usual, but if the health check returns a status of unhealthy, then Amazon Route 53 will stop returning the value of the unhealthy endpoint, and begin responding to queries with the value of the failover record.

Utilizing failover records helps ensure that you only return answers for resources that are healthy and reachable from the outside world, by routing your end users away from failed or unhealthy parts of your application.

Failing over to a healthy endpoint ensures minimal downtime for your website or application.


Key Features:Benefits of DNS Failover

Can improve the availability of your applications running on AWS.

Allows you to configure backup and failover scenarios for your own applications.

Enables highly available multi-region architectures on AWS

Helps add redundancy to your application and maintain high availability for your end users.

Enables customers to run primary applications simultaneously in multiple AWS regions, with Amazon Route 53 automatically removing from service any region where your application is unavailable.


Key Features:Simple Failover Configuration

Amazon Route 53

Web App Server

DataVolume

Database Server

Primary(Active)

Secondary (Inactive)

Health Check = Healthy


Key Features:Simple Failover Configuration

Amazon Route 53

Web App Server

DataVolume

Database Server

Primary(Inactive)

Secondary (Active)

Health Check = Unhealthy


Use Case:Loggly

Loggly provides its customers with a cloud-based logging-as-a-service platform that indexes customer log data to help identify issues in real time, pinpoint root causes, and resolve problems quickly.

To take advantage of flexibility and scalability, Loggly built their distributed architecture on AWS.

Loggly’s customers are primarily cloud based, which means they are typically logging more.


Use Case:Loggly

Loggly has a total of 5 Hosted Zones with 600+ Record Sets, and 30+ health checks across the board.

They use cli53 and the AWS Console to manage their Record Sets.

Loggly utilizes Simple Round Robin for collectors.

Each Record Set has health checks for HTTP, TCP, etc. CollectorCollector Collector

Loggly Pipeline


CollectorCollector Collector

Use Case:Loggly

Loggly uses Health Checks to detect collectors out of service.

Once a collector is detected as being unhealthy or out of service, a notification fires and a new collector gets added.

The previous elastic IP gets assigned to the new collector.

During this process, Loggly suffers no downtime or performance degradation.

Collector

Loggly Pipeline

Collector


Key Features:Advanced Routing Policies

Simple Routing: With simple routing, Amazon Route 53 responds to DNS queries based only on the values in the resource record set (i.e., the IP).

Use a simple routing policy when you have a single resource that performs a given function for your domain.

Amazon Route 53 also supports complex routing policies, including:

• Weighted Round Robin Routing

• Latency Based Routing

• Geolocation Routing


Advanced Routing PoliciesWeighted Round Robin Routing

Weighted resource record sets allow you to associate multiple records with a single DNS name.

• Use the weighted routing policy when you have multiple resources that perform the same function, and you want Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to those resources in proportions that you specify. For example, sending 40% of queries to one server, and 60% to the other.

The probability of any one resource record set being selected depends on its weight as a proportion of the total weight for all resource record sets in the group.

Can be useful for a variety of purposes, including load balancing and testing new versions of software.

Weight for a given resource record set

Sum of the weights for the resource record sets


Advanced Routing PoliciesLatency Based Routing

Latency Based Routing enables you to run multiple stacks of your application in different EC2 regions around the world.

Use latency based routing when you have resources in multiple EC2 data centers that perform the same function and you want Amazon Route 53 to respond to DNS queries with the resources that provide the lowest network latency.

Amazon Route 53 will route end users to the end-point that provides the lowest latency.

Latency between hosts on the Internet can change over time as a result of changes in network connectivity and routing. Latency-based routing is based on latency measurements performed over a period of time, and the measurements reflect these changes.

Supported endpoints: EC2 instances (with or without an Elastic IP), or ELBs used for EC2 instances.


Advanced Routing PoliciesGeolocation Routing

Geolocation Routing directs requests to specific endpoints based on the geographic location from which the request originates.

• Use geolocation routing when you want Amazon Route 53 to respond to DNS queries based on the location of your users.

Enables you to customize localized content or restrict distribution of content to only the markets you have licensed, or select to distribute to.

There are three levels of geographic granularity: continent, country, and state.

Distribution of requests is more predictable and consistent than LBR.

Geo DNS can be combined with LBR or DNS Failover for a variety of low-latency and fault-tolerant architectures.


Geographical ReachEdge Network as of Q3 2015

North America South America Europe Asia/Pacific

Ashburn, VAAtlanta, GADallas, TXHayward, CAJacksonville, FLLos Angeles, CAMiami, FL

Newark, NJNew York, NYPalo Alto, CASan Jose, CASeattle, WASouth Bend, INSt. Louis, MO

Rio De JaneiroSao Paulo

AmsterdamDublinFrankfurtLondonMadrid

MarseilleMilanParisStockholmWarsaw

ChennaiHong KongManilaMelbourneMumbaiOsaka

SeoulSydneySingaporeTaipeiTokyo


Key Features:Domain Name Registration

Registering Domains Using Amazon Route 53• Use Amazon Route 53 to search for a new domain you are interested in registering.

• Amazon Route 53 supports a large number of TLDs, including both generic TLDs, and Geographic Domains.

• When you register a domain, Amazon Route 53 will automatically create the hosted zone for your domain.

Transferring Domains to Amazon Route 53• You can transfer domain registration from another registrar, for supported TLDs, to Amazon Route 53 or from

one AWS account to another.

• Transferring your domains into Route 53 allows you to manage all of your domains in the same place as your name servers and hosted zones.


Key Features:Private DNS

Use Amazon Route 53 to manage custom DNS names for resources internal to a VPC, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and ElastiCache nodes.

Private DNS prevents these names and your network topology from being exposed to the public Internet.

You can also use Amazon Route 53 to configure split-view DNS, also known as split-horizon DNS.

Split Horizon DNS enables you to maintain both internal and external versions of the same website or application by configuring public and private hosted zones to return different internal and external IP addresses for the same domain name.

Useful for testing changes before making them public.


Key Features:Alias Records to AWS Resources

Amazon Route 53 enables customers to use Alias records to point to other AWS resources.

• Use alias records to point to an ELB load balancer, an Amazon S3 bucket that is configured as a static website, an alternate domain name for a CloudFront distribution, or another Amazon Route 53 resource record set in the same hosted zone

Alias records save time as changes to the endpoint the record is pointing to are automatically recognized.

• For example, a customer has an alias record pointing to an ELB load balancer. If the IP address of the load balancer changes, Amazon Route 53 will automatically reflect those changes without any changes to the hosted zone that contains the record sets.

Queries to Alias records that are mapped to Elastic Load Balancers, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and Amazon S3 website buckets are free.


Use Case:Outback Steakhouse

Outback Steakhouse was in the process of designing a national digital marketing campaign, in collaboration with Engauge, using several AWS products in the process.

Utilized Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to an Elastic Load Balancer.

Using AWS, they were able to meet aggressive timelines and deployed an enterprise solution in weeks.

They were able to utilize various AWS services to meet all of their needs.

Utilized Amazon Premium Support to tap into the AWS Solution Architects and connected with service teams to optimize their application.


Use Case:Outback Steakhouse

“With a heavy load of over 250,000 requests a minute in our 'flash' campaign, Amazon Web Services made sure our website was always available. Without AWS, it would have taken us 2 months to set up and configure our servers and infrastructure for a campaign that would last only 1 week. With the AWS Cloud, we were able to save 90% over using our old, on-premises design.“

- Raghu Kakarala, CTO of Engauge.


Host multiple domains on the same set of four Amazon Route 53 name servers.

Enables “white label” name server names (e.g. ns1.example.com) pointing to Amazon Route 53 name servers.

Key Features:Reusable Delegation Sets

Enables auditing of all API calls and modifications to a customer’s Amazon Route 53 resources, including hosted zones, DNS records, health checks, and domain names.

Integration with AWS CloudTrail


Mar14

Apr14

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Jan15

Nov14

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Feb15

Pace of Innovation

Mar15

Apr15

• Seoul, Korea edge location• Editable hosted zone

comments

• AWS CloudTrail Integration• Tagging for hosted zones and domains• Health Check Status Column and One-

Click Alarms

• Private DNS within VPC• Health Check Failure Reasons• Reusable delegation sets

• Geo DNS• Domain Name Registration• Lower pricing on DNS queries• Melbourne, Australia edge location• Editable health checks • Tagging for health checks

• AWS Mobile App support for Amazon Route 53

• Domain Name Based Health Checks

Feb14

• Fast Interval Health Checks• Configurable Failover Thresholds

May15

Jun15

Jul15

Aug15

• Calculated Health Checks• Latency Measurement Health

Checks

Sep15


Pay-as-you-go Pricing*Hosted Zones

• First 25 Hosted Zones - $0.50 per HZ / month• For additional Hosted Zones - $0.10 per HZ / month

Standard Queries• First 1 Billion queries - $0.40 per million queries / month• Over 1 Billion queries - $0.20 per million queries / month

Queries to Alias records that are mapped to Elastic Load Balancers, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and Amazon S3 website buckets are free.

* Price as of 9.14.15

Latency Based Routing Queries• First 1 Billion queries - $0.60 per million queries / month• Over 1 Billion queries - $0.30 per million queries / month

Geo DNS Queries• First 1 Billion queries - $0.70 per million queries / month• Over 1 Billion queries - $0.35 per million queries / month


Health Check Pricing*New and existing customers receive health checks of up to 50 AWS endpoints that are within or linked to the same AWS account for free.

Basic Health Checks• AWS Endpoints - $0.50 per health check / month

• Non-AWS Endpoints - $0.75 per health check / month

Advanced Health Check Options• AWS Endpoints - $1 / month per optional feature

• Non-AWS Endpoints - $2 / month per optional feature

* Price as of 9.14.15


How To Get Started

Sergey Royt, Senior Software Development Engineer, AWS


Q&A

amazon route 53 - webinar presentation 9.16.2015

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