Review and Tutorial For Amazon AWS Route 53 DNS service

Amazon is on fire adding new features to their Amazon Web Services (AWS) lineup. It seems like ever month a new major product is released, and I inevitably have to stop what I’m doing and hack something together with it. Route 53 is Amazon’s answer to DNS-As-A-Service, competing with the likes of UltraDNS, EasyDNS, Dynect and others. As a CTO/sys-admin, this is in intriguing service, because running my own DNS takes time, monitoring and money. Except for the lack of a GUI (which I’ll get into later), I think this service is awesome.

Pricing

$1/month/zone +
$0.50 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month
$0.25 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month

For the average/moderate/large website, this is an extremely nominal line item.

Setup

This was harder than it had to be, due to the fact that there isn’t an official  GUI to manage your zones from within your AWS manager. After signing up I expected a new tab to appear in my management console. Much to my surprise, you need interface with an API to add/edit/delete zones. Isn’t this 2011? Seriously, how long could it take them to create a tab in here to make everyone’s lives easier?

This is where some entrepreneurs come in and build a business around creating GUIs for Amazon’s CLIs. DNS30.com is a simple front end for the Route 53 service that simply works. You enter your AWS authorization keys and then create zones using simple forms. For my setup I was simply moving all my DNS from in house servers to AWS, so I didn’t have to worry about downtime.  My steps were:

1) Order Route 53 Service
2) Create new set of Authorization Keys for DNS30.com to use, separate from the one I use to spin-up servers with.
3) Signup for beta DNS30.com service. Once logged in and setup, it will give you 4 AWS nameservers to use.
4) Create identical resource records on DNS30 from my current zone file
5) Test that zone is working correctly using DIG…. # dig @ns-xyz.aws-dns.org mydomain.com a
6) Once I verify that AWS is returning correct zone data, I went to my registrar and pointed my domain to the AWS provided nameservers.

Testing

As I mentioned earlier, using DIG at the command line is an easy way to test DNS response times. It appears from my tests that the AWS Route 53 dns servers are slightly slower than my homebrewed VPS setup, but 10 milliseconds isn’t the lowest hanging fruit in my site optimization strategy for CampusLIVE. The example test resulted in a 70ms response time.

jared@ubuntux:~$ dig @ns-335.awsdns-41.com campuslive.com a

 

 

 

Posted in Amazon AWS, Computers & Internet