Amazon Route 53 | Domain Name System (DNS)

Question 1

Does Amazon Route 53 provide query logging capability?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 1

You can configure Amazon Route 53 to log information about the queries that Amazon Route 53 receives including date-time stamp, domain name, query type, location etc. When you configure query logging, Amazon Route 53 starts to send logs to CloudWatch Logs. You use CloudWatch Logs tools to access the query logs; For more information please see our documentation.

Question 2

Does Amazon Route 53 use an anycast network?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 2

Yes. Anycast is a networking and routing technology that helps your end users’ DNS queries get answered from the optimal Route 53 location given network conditions. As a result, your users get high availability and improved performance with Route 53.

Question 3

Is there a limit to the number of hosted zones I can manage using Amazon Route 53?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 3

Each Amazon Route 53 account is limited to a maximum of 500 hosted zones and 10,000 resource record sets per hosted zone. Complete our request for a higher limit and we will respond to your request within two business days.

Question 4

How can I import a zone into Route 53?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 4

Route 53 supports importing standard DNS zone files which can be exported from many DNS providers as well as standard DNS server software such as BIND. For newly-created hosted zones, as well as existing hosted zones that are empty except for the default NS and SOA records, you can paste your zone file directly into the Route 53 console, and Route 53 automatically creates the records in your hosted zone. To get started with zone file import, read our walkthrough in the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.

Question 5

Can I create multiple hosted zones for the same domain name?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 5

Yes. Creating multiple hosted zones allows you to verify your DNS setting in a “test” environment, and then replicate those settings on a “production” hosted zone. For example, hosted zone Z1234 might be your test version of example.com, hosted on name servers ns-1, ns-2, ns-3, and ns-4. Similarly, hosted zone Z5678 might be your production version of example.com, hosted on ns-5, ns-6, ns-7, and ns-8. Since each hosted zone has a virtual set of name servers associated with that zone, Route 53 will answer DNS queries for example.com differently depending on which name server you send the DNS query to.

Question 6

Does Amazon Route 53 also provide website hosting?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 6

No. Amazon Route 53 is an authoritative DNS service and does not provide website hosting. However, you can use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to host a static website. To host a dynamic website or other web applications, you can use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides flexibility, control, and significant cost savings over traditional web hosting solutions. Learn more about Amazon EC2 here. For both static and dynamic websites, you can provide low latency delivery to your global end users with Amazon CloudFront. Learn more about Amazon CloudFront here.

Question 7

Which DNS record types does Amazon Route 53 support?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 7

Amazon Route 53 currently supports the following DNS record types:

A (address record)

AAAA (IPv6 address record)

CNAME (canonical name record)

CAA (certification authority authorization)

MX (mail exchange record)

NAPTR (name authority pointer record)

NS (name server record)

PTR (pointer record)

SOA (start of authority record)

SPF (sender policy framework)

SRV (service locator)

TXT (text record)

Additionally, Amazon Route 53 offers ‘Alias’ records (an Amazon Route 53-specific virtual record). Alias records are used to map resource record sets in your hosted zone to Amazon Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, Amazon CloudFront distributions, AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments, or Amazon S3 buckets that are configured as websites. Alias records work like a CNAME record in that you can map one DNS name (example.com) to another ‘target’ DNS name (elb1234.elb.amazonaws.com). They differ from a CNAME record in that they are not visible to resolvers. Resolvers only see the A record and the resulting IP address of the target record.

We anticipate adding additional record types in the future.

Question 8

Does Amazon Route 53 support wildcard entries? If so, what record types support them?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 8

Yes. To make it even easier for you to configure DNS settings for your domain, Amazon Route 53 supports wildcard entries for all record types, except NS records. A wildcard entry is a record in a DNS zone that will match requests for any domain name based on the configuration you set. For example, a wildcard DNS record such as *.example.com will match queries for www.example.com and subdomain.example.com.

Question 9

What is the default TTL for the various record types and can I change these values?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 9

The time for which a DNS resolver caches a response is set by a value called the time to live (TTL) associated with every record. Amazon Route 53 does not have a default TTL for any record type. You must always specify a TTL for each record so that caching DNS resolvers can cache your DNS records to the length of time specified through the TTL.

Question 10

Can I use ‘Alias records with my sub-domains?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 10

Yes. You can also use Alias records to map your sub-domains (www.example.com, pictures.example.com, etc.) to your ELB load balancers, CloudFront distributions, or S3 website buckets.

Question 11

Are changes to resource record sets transactional?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 11

Yes. A transactional change helps ensure that the change is consistent, reliable, and independent of other changes. Amazon Route 53 has been designed so that changes complete entirely on any individual DNS server, or not at all. This helps ensure your DNS queries are always answered consistently, which is important when making changes such as flipping between destination servers. When using the API, each call to ChangeResourceRecordSets returns an identifier that can be used to track the status of the change. Once the status is reported as INSYNC, your change has been performed on all of the Route 53 DNS servers.

Question 12

Can I associate multiple IP addresses with a single record?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 12

Yes. Associating multiple IP addresses with a single record is often used for balancing the load of geographically-distributed web servers. Amazon Route 53 allows you to list multiple IP addresses for an A record and responds to DNS requests with the list of all configured IP addresses.

Question 13

How quickly will changes I make to my DNS settings on Amazon Route 53 propagate globally?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 13

Amazon Route 53 is designed to propagate updates you make to your DNS records to its world-wide network of authoritative DNS servers within 60 seconds under normal conditions. A change is successfully propagated world-wide when the API call returns an INSYNC status listing.

Note that caching DNS resolvers are outside the control of the Amazon Route 53 service and will cache your resource record sets according to their time to live (TTL). The INSYNC or PENDING status of a change refers only to the state of Route 53’s authoritative DNS servers.

Question 14

Can I see a history of my changes and other operations on my Route 53 resources?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 14

Yes, via AWS CloudTrail you can record and log the API call history for Route 53. Please reference the CloudTrail product page to get started.

Question 15

Can I use AWS CloudTrail logs to roll back changes to my hosted zones?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 15

No. We recommend that you do not use CloudTrail logs to roll back changes to your hosted zones, because reconstruction of your zone change history using your CloudTrail logs may be incomplete.

Your AWS CloudTrail logs can be used for the purposes of security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing.

Question 16

Does Amazon Route 53 support DNSSEC?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 16

Amazon Route 53 does not support DNSSEC for DNS at this time. But Amazon Route 53 allows DNSSEC on domain registration.

Question 17

Does Amazon Route 53 support IPv6?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 17

Yes. Amazon Route 53 supports both forward (AAAA) and reverse (PTR) IPv6 records. The Amazon Route 53 service itself is also available over IPv6. Recursive DNS resolvers on IPv6 networks can use either IPv4 or IPv6 transport in order to submit DNS queries to Amazon Route 53. Amazon Route 53 health checks also support monitoring of endpoints using the IPv6 protocol.

Question 18

Can I point my zone apex (example.com versus www.example.com) at my Elastic Load Balancer?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 18

Yes. Amazon Route 53 offers a special type of record called an ‘Alias’ record that lets you map your zone apex (example.com) DNS name to your ELB DNS name (i.e. elb1234.elb.amazonaws.com). IP addresses associated with Amazon Elastic Load Balancers can change at any time due to scaling up, scaling down, or software updates. Route 53 responds to each request for an Alias record with one or more IP addresses for the load balancer. Queries to Alias records that are mapped to ELB load balancers are free. These queries are listed as “Intra-AWS-DNS-Queries” on the Amazon Route 53 usage report.

Question 19

Can I point my zone apex (example.com versus www.example.com) at my website hosted on Amazon S3?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 19

Yes. Amazon Route 53 offers a special type of record called an ‘Alias’ record that lets you map your zone apex (example.com) DNS name to your Amazon S3 website bucket (i.e. example.com.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com). IP addresses associated with Amazon S3 website endpoints can change at any time due to scaling up, scaling down, or software updates. Route 53 responds to each request for an Alias record with one IP address for the bucket. Route 53 doesn’t charge for queries to Alias records that are mapped to an S3 bucket that is configured as a website. These queries are listed as “Intra-AWS-DNS-Queries” on the Amazon Route 53 usage report.

Question 20

Can I point my zone apex (example.com versus www.example.com) at my Amazon CloudFront distribution?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 20

Yes. Amazon Route 53 offers a special type of record called an ‘Alias’ record that lets you map your zone apex (example.com) DNS name to your Amazon CloudFront distribution (for example, d123.cloudfront.net). IP addresses associated with Amazon CloudFront endpoints vary based on your end user’s location (in order to direct the end user to the nearest CloudFront edge location) and can change at any time due to scaling up, scaling down, or software updates. Route 53 responds to each request for an Alias record with the IP address(es) for the distribution. Route 53 doesn’t charge for queries to Alias records that are mapped to a CloudFront distribution. These queries are listed as “Intra-AWS-DNS-Queries” on the Amazon Route 53 usage report.

Question 21

Can I point my zone apex (example.com versus www.example.com) at my AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 21

Yes. Amazon Route 53 offers a special type of record called an ‘Alias’ record that lets you map your zone apex (example.com) DNS name to your AWS Elastic Beanstalk DNS name (i.e. example.elasticbeanstalk.com). IP addresses associated with AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments can change at any time due to scaling up, scaling down, or software updates. Route 53 responds to each request for an Alias record with one or more IP addresses for the environment. Queries to Alias records that are mapped to AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments are free. These queries are listed as “Intra-AWS-DNS-Queries” on the Amazon Route 53 usage report.

Question 22

How can I use Amazon Route 53 with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon CloudFront?

Domain Name System (DNS)

Amazon Route 53 | Networking & Content Delivery

Answer 22

For websites delivered via Amazon CloudFront or static websites hosted on Amazon S3, you can use the Amazon Route 53 service to create an Alias record for your domain which points to the CloudFront distribution or S3 website bucket. For S3 buckets not configured to host static websites, you can create a CNAME record for your domain and the S3 bucket name. In all cases, note that you will also need to configure your S3 bucket or your CloudFront distribution respectively with the alternate domain name entry to completely establish the alias between your domain name and the AWS domain name for your bucket or distribution.

For CloudFront distributions and S3 buckets configured to host static websites, we recommend creating an ‘Alias’ record that maps to your CloudFront distribution or S3 website bucket, instead of using CNAMEs. Alias records have two advantages: first, unlike CNAMEs, you can create an Alias record for your zone apex (e.g. example.com, instead of www.example.com), and second, queries to Alias records are free of charge.