AWS Route 53 DNS - Features and Pricing

While the Amazon brand has become a household name, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Route 53 are mostly known in the tech industry or by companies that utilize their cloud and DNS services. As a provider in the DNS sector ourselves, we know there are a lot of options to choose from and understand how overwhelming it can be to decide on what solutions best fit your organization.

In this blog, we aim to cut through the marketing fluff and give you an honest breakdown of AWS and Route 53 services and how they compare with Constellix.

What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?

AWS is a cloud computing platform that offers a long list of cloud-based services and storage solutions for businesses. The AWS Partner Network (APN) is made up of thousands of systems utilizing the AWS platform. AWS also affords independent vendors the ability to customize their products to work alongside their services.

What is Route 53 DNS?

Route 53 is Amazon’s managed DNS service. It was introduced in December 2010 and its name was inspired by the port that addresses DNS requests: TCP/UDP port 53. Most customers using AWS cloud solutions also rely on Route 53 for DNS services, as it can be bundled in with other services.  

AWS Route 53 DNS Top DNS Features

Amazon Route 53 offers solid DNS-based solutions that are especially effective when paired with other services that run on AWS’s infrastructure. Here is a list of Route 53’s top DNS features.

• Resolver DNS Firewall
  With Route 53’s resolver firewall, you can protect DNS queries and filter outbound traffic according to rules you set.
• Latency-based Routing
  With this option, you can configure DNS traffic to favor an AWS region with the lowest latency.
• GeoDNS
  GeoDNS is a geographically-based DNS solution that routes queries based on the user’s location by continent, country, or state, and can also be configured based on language. This service can be combined with other Route 53 services as well.
• Traffic Flow
  This feature is Route 53’s traffic management solution. It enables you to direct traffic based on geoproximity, the health of resources, and latency.
• Weighted Round Robin
  With Weighted Round Robin, you are able to balance your traffic load based on cost, location, or capacity so that your preferred server(s) receives the most traffic, as opposed to all servers receiving equal distribution like traditional Round Robin configurations. 
• DNS Failover
  Failover automatically sends traffic to an alternative location if your resource is down. While Route 53 monitors the health status of your endpoints, it is unclear if it checks to see if an alternative server is healthy prior to routing traffic to it.
• Health Checks and Monitoring
  Route 53 allows you to create and monitor health checks for your DNS servers and applications, which is used in conjunction with Failover. If a resource fails a health check, Route 53 will automatically direct traffic to another resource.
• Private DNS
  This option helps protect your DNS data from public internet exposure and is used in conjunction with AWS’s virtual private cloud (VPC) service.
  

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Constellix DNS Service Provider Comparison Route 53

Now let’s take a look at Constellix’s top features and how they compare with Route 53’s. As you can see, Constellix provides similar offerings, but there are a couple of unique features offered as well.

Latency Load Balancing

This option is comparable to Route 53’s Latency-based Routing. 
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Weighted Round Robin‍

Serves the same purpose as Route 53’s Weighted Round Robin.

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DNS Failover

Failover operates in the same fashion as Route 53 with one key difference: Constellix checks the health of your alternative resources before redirecting traffic.

Vanity DNS

‍Vanity DNS at Constellix serves the same purpose as Route 53’s Private DNS, but without the need for another specialized service. You can also use Vanity DNS to rebrand Constellix nameservers and add a dedicated IP address to your Vanity DNS servers.

GeoDNS
‍Like Route 53, Constellix’s GeoDNS routes traffic based on user location and can deliver content based on language. One stand-out difference is that Constellix lets you filter traffic at city level, IP address, and ASN.

Traffic Steering

This option is comparable to Route 53’s Traffic Flow.

IP Filtering

IP filtering is one of Constellix’s GeoDNS solutions. It allows you to create a firewall at the DNS level by creating rules for DNS records. Filters can be used to direct or block traffic by region, country, city, or even as specific as an IP address, ASN, or geographical coordinates.
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Sonar Performance Monitoring (health checks)

This feature works similarly to Route 53’s health checks, but also automates tasks such as failover and GeoDNS configuration updates. It makes DNS “smart” and serves as an automated disaster recovery tool.

Real-Time Traffic Anomaly Detection (RTTAD)

This service uses machine learning (based on the Fourier Arima model) to analyze and predict your web traffic. It also allows you to view DNS traffic in real time, and if any unusual or suspicious activity is detected, instant notifications are sent to your team.

Query Reports and Statics

In-depth, real-time reporting on domain activity for troubleshooting and performance enhancements. 

Multi-CDN Management

This option lets you manage all of your CDNs in one place, prevents outages, and improves performance by doubling your coverage map.

Route 53 Pricing

The pricing model at Route 53 is similar to Constellix in that there are no upfront fees or query commitments. Route 53 charges a monthly fee for each hosted zone, has a per-query charge (except for Alias A records that point to certain other AWS services), as well as a yearly charge per domain registered with Route 53. Constellix, on the other hand, operates on a per-usage model (you only pay for what you configure) and includes free access to the query reporting feature. 

Notable AWS Route 53 Outages

AWS provides a stable cloud and DNS service, but it does have a history of notable outages that have affected a large portion of domains on the internet. For instance, in 2012, the U.S.-East region experienced an outage due to a DNS record update that didn’t propagate across all servers. An Amazon S3 service, which uses Route 53 DNS, had an outage in March 2017 due to a typo during a debugging exercise. A hijack attack on Route 53 in April 2018 took out their DNS services, but AWS was able to rectify the issue within a few hours. Amazon S3 was taken down again by a DDoS attack that was targeting specific domain names in 2019. There were reports of ignored anomalies that occurred prior to the attack, and Neustar, charged with mitigation of the attack, took hours to respond. More recently, Amazon’s photo services went down in May 2021, though the cause was not disclosed.

Amazon uses best practices for its own Amazon.com site by utilizing secondary DNS, though they do not use Route 53 for this domain, and instead, use two external DNS providers. Considering the company’s outage history, it would be prudent for AWS and Route 53 clients to implement primary/primary or traditional Secondary DNS to ensure their domains don’t experience costly disruptions.

AWS Route 53 DNS Speed Comparison

When it comes to DNS speed, Route 53 lags behind Constellix. For instance, in the last 30 days, PerfOps shows Route 53 to be 105% slower in raw performance in North America and 108% slower from a resolver’s point of view. This demonstrates that while AWS has a massive infrastructure and a significant number of points of presence (PoP), the company’s speeds still suffer. This is largely due to the number of services offered by AWS, as it significantly increases traffic across its network, and in a sense, causes its own services to compete with each other. Another potential cause of Route 53’s slower speeds is that if systems are housed at an external location (outside of a data center), queries have to make one additional stop before a record can be provided.

Speed is one of the most important factors for running a successful domain. Today’s online consumers are more demanding than ever before. As technology evolves, user patience actually devolves because they become accustomed to immediacy. This explains why even a one-second delay in load time for a website can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions. Not only that, but Google now uses site speed as a ranking factor for SEO. 

Route 53 DNS Limitations

Although AWS Route 53 offers a robust DNS feature set, it does have its limitations. For one, because AWS provides such a large amount of cloud-based options, it can lead to vendor lock-in. This happens due to the need to build AWS-specific API calls for certain services or simply because it appears to be an all-encompassing package deal. The problem with that is even when utilizing Failover, without Secondary DNS, domains lack redundancy at every point of failure and can still experience an outage if Route 53 goes down.

Another limitation is the lack of support for private zone transfers, as well as private endpoints over virtual private networks (VPN) for on-site customers unless you use AWS’s VPC service. Users are also limited to 20 domains per AWS account, 500 hosted zones, and 10,000 records per hosted zone. To have more would require contacting AWS and would likely result in a higher monthly fee. And, as mentioned earlier, the amount of services offered by AWS can also be a detriment to its network, as such a heavily utilized network can result in slower speeds.

AWS Route 53 and Constellix DNS Integration

Overall, AWS Route 53 provides a respectable DNS solution for businesses. However, pairing it with another provider such as Constellix will give your domain a competitive edge. Not only would a primary/primary DNS configuration between Constellix and Route 53 help fill the gap in limitations, it will also ensure you have redundancy at every point of failure. Furthermore, as resolvers learn which nameserver is the fastest and tend to prefer that server, you will benefit from Constellix’s faster speeds while still being able to take advantage of all the services Route 53 and AWS have to offer. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

If you liked this, you may find these helpful:

https://www.cloudsavvyit.com/2031/why-you-should-use-aws-route-53-over-a-dumb-dns/

https://aws.amazon.com/route53/

https://ns1.com/resources/aws-dns