Unlimited-Data. moved to lab.itbee.vn : Amazon Route 53 DNS Service

Amazon Route 53 DNS Service: "

Even working in Amazon
Web Services,
I’m finding the frequency of new product announcements and updates a bit dizzying.
It’s amazing how fast the cloud is taking shape and the feature set is filling out.
Utility computing has really been on fire over the last 9 months. I’ve never seen
an entire new industry created and come fully to life this fast. Fun times.

Before joining AWS, I used to say that I had
an inside line on what AWS was working upon and what new features were coming in the
near future. My trick? I went to AWS customer meetings and just listened. AWS
delivers what customers are asking for with such regularity that it’s really not all
that hard to predict new product features soon to be delivered. This trend continues
with today’s announcement. Customers have been asking for a Domain
Name Service with consistency and,
today, AWS is announcing the availability of Route
53, a scalable, highly-redundant
and reliable, global DNS service.

The Domain
Name System is essentially a global,
distributed database that allows various pieces of information to be associated with
a domain name. In the most common case, DNS is used to look up the numeric IP
address for an domain name. So, for example, I just looked up Amazon.com and
found that one of the addresses being used to host Amazon.com is 207.171.166.252.
And, when your browser accessed this blog (assuming you came here directly rather
than using RSS) it would have looked up perspectives.mvdirona.com to
get an IP address. This mapping is stored in an DNS “A” (address) record. Other popular
DNS records are CNAME (canonical name), MX (mail exchange), and SPF (Sender Policy
Framework). A full list of DNS record types is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DNS_record_types.
Route 53 currently supports:

• A
(address record)

• AAAA
(IPv6 address record)

• CNAME
(canonical name record)

• MX
(mail exchange record)

• NS
(name server record)

• PTR
(pointer record)

• SOA
(start of authority record)

• SPF
(sender policy framework)

• SRV
(service locator)

• TXT
(text record)

DNS, on the surface, is fairly
simple and is easy to understand. What is difficult with DNS is providing absolute
rock-solid stability at scales ranging from a request per day on some domains to billions
on others. Running DNS rock-solid, low-latency, and highly reliable is hard. And
it’s just the kind of problem that loves scale. Scale allows more investment in the
underlying service and supports a wide, many-datacenter footprint.

The AWS Route 53 Service is hosted
in a global network of edge locations including the
following 16 facilities:

· United
States

• Ashburn,
VA

• Dallas/Fort
Worth, TX

• Los
Angeles, CA

• Miami,
FL

• New
York, NY

• Newark,
NJ

• Palo
Alto, CA

• Seattle,
WA

• St.
Louis, MO

· Europe

• Amsterdam

• Dublin

• Frankfurt

• London

· Asia

• Hong
Kong

• Tokyo

• Singapore

Many DNS lookups are resolved in local caches
but, when there is a cache miss, it will need to be routed back to the authoritative
name server. The right approach
to answering these requests with low latency is to route to the nearest datacenter
hosting an appropriate DNS server. In Route 53 this is done using anycast.
Anycast is a cool routing trick where the same IP address range is advertised to be
at many different locations. Using this technique, the same IP address range is advertized
as being in each of the world-wide fleet of datacenters. This results in the request
being routed to the nearest facility from a network perspective.

Route 53 routes to the nearest
datacenter to deliver low-latency, reliable results. This is good but Route 53 is
not the only DNS service that is well implemented over a globally distributed fleet
of datacenters. What makes Route 53 unique is it’s a cloud service. Cloud means the
price is advertised rather than negotiated. Cloud means you make an API call
rather than talking to a sales representative. Cloud means it’s a simple API and you
don’t need professional services or a customer support contact. And cloud means its
running NOW rather than tomorrow morning when the administration team comes in. Offering
a rock-solid service is half the battle but it’s the cloud aspects of Route 53 that
are most interesting.

Route 53 pricing is advertised
and available to all:

· Hosted
Zones: $1 per hosted zone per month

· Requests:
$0.50 per million queries for first billion queries and $0.25 per million queries
over 1B month

You can have it running in less time than
it took to read this posting. Go to: ROUTE
53 Details. You don’t
need to talk to anyone, negotiate a volume discount, hire a professional service team,
call the customer support group, or wait until tomorrow. Make the API calls to set
it up and, on average, 60 seconds later you are fully operating.