Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. You can use Route 53 to perform three main functions:
Register domain names Your website needs a name, such as example.com. Route 53 lets you register a name for your website or web application, known as a domain name.
Route internet traffic to the resources for your domain When a user opens a web browser and enters your domain name (example.com) or subdomain name (apex.example.com) in the address bar, Route 53 helps connect the browser with your website or web application.
Check the health of your resources Route 53 sends automated requests over the internet to a resource, such as a web server, to verify that it's reachable, available, and functional. You also can choose to receive notifications when a resource becomes unavailable and choose to route internet traffic away from unhealthy resources.
When you create a record, you choose a routing policy, which determines how Amazon Route 53 responds to queries:
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Simple routing policy – Use for a single resource that performs a given function for your domain, for example, a web server that serves content for the example.com website. Randomly pick an IP from the list.
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Failover routing policy – Use when you want to configure active-passive (primary-secondary) failover.
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Geolocation routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your users.
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Geoproximity routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another.
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Latency routing policy – Use when you have resources in multiple AWS Regions and you want to route traffic to the region that provides the best latency.
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Multivalue answer routing policy – Use when you want Route 53 to respond to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records selected at random.
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Weighted routing policy – Use to route traffic to multiple resources in proportions that you specify. For instance 20% and 80%.