AWS Content Delivery and DNS Services

Question 1

What is Amazon Route 53?

Answer 1

Amazon Route 53 is the AWS Domain Name Service.

Question 2

What functions does Route 53 have?

Answer 2

Route 53 performs three main functions:

Domain registration – Route 53 allows you to register domain names.
Domain Name Service (DNS) – Route 53 translates name to IP addresses using a global network of authoritative DNS servers.
Health checking – Route 53 sends automated requests to your application to verify that it’s reachable, available, and functional.

You can use any combination of these functions.

Question 3

What are some benefits of Route 53?

Answer 3

Route 53 benefits:

• Domain registration.
• DNS service.
• Traffic Flow (send users to the best endpoint).
• Health checking.
• DNS failover (automatically change domain endpoint if system fails).
• Integrates with ELB, S3, and CloudFront as endpoints.

Question 4

What is the purpose of Routing Policies in Route 53?

Answer 4

Routing policies determine how Route 53 DNS responds to queries.

Question 5

What Routing Policies does Route 53 have?

Answer 5

Policy What it Does
Simple Simple DNS response providing the IP address associated with a name
Failover If primary is down (based on health checks), routes to secondary destination
Geolocation Uses geographic location you’re in (e.g. Europe) to route you to the closest region
Geoproximity Routes you to the closest region within a geographic area
Latency Directs you based on the lowest latency route to resources
Multivalue answer Returns several IP addresses and functions as a basic load balancer
Weighted Uses the relative weights assigned to resources to determine which to route to

Question 6

What Routing Policies does Route 53 have?

Answer 6

Policy What it Does
Simple Simple DNS response providing the IP address associated with a name
Failover If primary is down (based on health checks), routes to secondary destination
Geolocation Uses geographic location you’re in (e.g. Europe) to route you to the closest region
Geoproximity Routes you to the closest region within a geographic area
Latency Directs you based on the lowest latency route to resources
Multivalue answer Returns several IP addresses and functions as a basic load balancer
Weighted Uses the relative weights assigned to resources to determine which to route to

Question 7

What is Amazon CloudFront?

Answer 7

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that allows you to store (cache) your content at “edge locations” located around the world.

This allows customers to access content more quickly and provides security against DDoS attacks.

CloudFront can be used for data, videos, applications, and APIs.

Question 8

What are some benefits of CloudFront?

Answer 8

CloudFront benefits:

• Cache content at Edge Location for fast distribution to customers.
• Built-in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection.
• Integrates with many AWS services (S3, EC2, ELB, Route 53, Lambda).

Question 9

What is origin and distribuition in CloudFront?

Answer 9

An origin is the origin of the files that the CDN will distribute.
Origins can be either an S3 bucket, an EC2 instance, an Elastic Load Balancer, or Route 53 – can also be external (non-AWS).

To distribute content with CloudFront you need to create a distribution.
There are two types of distribution: Web Distribution and RTMP Distribution.

Question 10

What is Edge Location and Regional Edge Cache in CloudFront?

Answer 10

CloudFront uses Edge Locations and Regional Edge Caches:

An edge location is the location where content is cached (separate to AWS regions/AZs).
Requests are automatically routed to the nearest edge location.

Regional Edge Caches are located between origin web servers and global edge locations and have a larger cache.
Regional Edge caches aim to get content closer to users.