I express enthusiasm for Amazon Route 53 as a DNS solution, particularly praising its integration with AWS services like S3 and EC2. I highlight the existing "Latency Based Routing" feature that directs users to the lowest-latency region.
New DNS Failover Capability
Route 53's new DNS failover capability dynamically alters the DNS configuration based on the health of your hosts. This supports both active-active load balancing and active-passive failover configurations across multiple hosts. Health checks can validate TCP connectivity and HTTP responses.
Key Consideration: Cost Impact
Failover requires low TTL values—typically minutes or seconds rather than the standard week-long intervals for static records. This dramatic increase in DNS query frequency directly impacts costs since Route 53 charges per query.
Organizations implementing this feature must account for a huge increment of the DNS requests and the associated billing implications.
Resources
AWS blog posts detail practical implementations: backup website creation using Route 53 and S3, plus multi-region latency-based routing capabilities.