Route 53 is a service in AWS which provides DNS as a service in aws cloud platform.
You can use Amazon Route 53 to register new domains, transfer existing domains, route traffic for your domains to your AWS and external resource, and monitor the health of your resources.
Route53 Functions:
DNS Management
Traffic Management
Availability Monitoring
Domain Registration
Workflow
Root name Server: these are the server which keep information about top level domain like .com, .in, .org.
N3: Authoritative Server → The last name server which have full information about your DNS.
Types of Domains AWS Provides
Generic Level Domain: .com, .org, .net
Geographic Level Domain: .en → England, .us → united states, .in → India
Basics of Route53
Route 53 performs three main functions -
Register a domain
As a DNS, it routes internet traffic to the resource for your domain.
Check the health of your resources - Route53 sends automated requests over the Internet to the resource (can be server) to verify that the server is reachable, functional and available.
Also, you can choose to receive notifications when a resource becomes unavailable and choose to route Internet traffic away from the unhealthy resource.
You can use route 53 for any combination of these functions: -
for example, you can route 53 both to register domain name and to route Internet traffic for the domain.
Or you can use route 53 through route Internet traffic for a domain that you registered with another domain register
Domain Registration with Route53
When you register a domain with route53, the service automatically makes itself the DNS service for the domain by doing the following-
It creates a hosted zone that has same name as your domain.
It assigns a set of four name servers to the hosted zone, unique to the account.
When someone uses a browser to access your website these name servers inform the browser where to add, find your resource such as web browser or and Amazon S3 bucket.
It gets the name server from the hosted zone and adds them to the domain.
You can register a domain with route53, if the top-level domain is included on the supported top-level domain list.
If the top-level domain is not included, you can’t register the domain with route53.
Using route 53 as your service
- You can use route 53 as the DNS service for any domain even, if the top-level domain for that domain is not registered in the AWS top-level domain list.
Note: Each Amazon route 53 account is limited to a maximum of 500 hosted zones and 10,000 resources record sets per hosted zone you can increase this limit by requesting to aws
Steps to configure Route53
You need to register a domain, this can be route 53 or any other DNS Registrar but then you have to connect to your domain name in that registrar to route 53.
Create hosted zone on route 53 this is clone automatically if you register your domain using route 53.
- In inside the hosted zone you need to create record sets.
Delegate to Route53
This step connects everything and makes it works.
Connect the domain name to route 53 hosted zone is called Delegation.
Update your domain registrar with the correct name server from your route 53 hosted zone.
No other customer hosted zone will share this delegation set with you.
Doing this means route 53 DNS service will be serving DNS traffic for the domain of the hosted zone.
If you registered your domain with a different registrar, you need to configure the route53 name servers list in your registrar DNS database for your domain.
If you are using another domain provider and you did all the changes -
When you migrate from one DNS provider to another, for an existing domain this change can take up to 48 hours to be effective.
This is because name server DNS records are typically cached across the DNS system globally on the Internet up to 48 hours (TTL) periods.
Transferring a domain to Route53
You can transfer a domain to route53 if the top-level domain is included on the following list.
If the top-level domain is not included, you can't transfer the domain to route 53.
For most top-level domain, you need to get an authorization code from the current registrar to transfer a domain.
Types of DNS server
Root Name Server: It provides the server's name which one have the information of top-level domain to DNS resolver
Authoritative Server: Server which provides the IP for access the domain.
Recursive Server: A recursive DNS lookup is where one DNS server communicates with several other DNS server to hunt down an IP addresses.
Name Server: It provides the IP address of authoritative server.