Route53

Question 1

Does Route53 require region selection?

Answer 1

No

Question 2

What is an A record?

Answer 2

Is the fundamental type of DNS record (A stands for Address). Translates a domain name to an its IP address.

Question 3

What is a CNAME record?

Answer 3

Canonical Name. It’s a record that can be used to resolve one domain name to another.

Question 4

What is an Alias record?

Answer 4

Alias Records are a record type created by Amazon for AWS, similar to CNAMEs. Alias Records are used to map resource record sets in your hosted zone to load balancers, CloudFront distributions,or S3 buckets that are configured as websites.

Question 5

How do you find the IP address for an ELB?

Answer 5

ELB’s do not have pre-defined IPv4 addresses, you resolve to them using a DNS name.

Question 6

Which one will be preferred “always”? A CNAME or an Alias record?

Answer 6

Always choose an Alias record over a CNAME

Question 7

How can you map a naked domain name (zone apex) to an ELB?

Answer 7

Using an Alias Record, which allows to resolve a naked domain name (a zone apex record) to an ELB DNS address.

Question 8

Are there charge differences between CNAMES and Alias record?

Answer 8

Yes. CNAMEs are charged, Alias records are free.

Question 9

What is the first step of using Route53?

Answer 9

Create a Hosted Zone

Question 10

What are the available routing policies in Route53?

Answer 10

• Simple
• Weighted
• Latency-based
• Failover
• Geolocation
• Geoproximity (traffic flow only)
• Multivalue answer

Question 11

How does the Weighted routing policy work?

Answer 11

Weighted Routing Policies let you split your traffic between regions based on different weights (traffic percentages) assigned (ex: 30% to US-EAST-1, 70% to US-WEST-1)

Question 12

How does the Latency routing policy work?

Answer 12

Latency based routing allows you to route your traffic based on the lowest network latency for your end user (i.e. which region will give them the fastest response time)

Question 13

How does the Failover routing policy work?

Answer 13

Failover routing policies are used when you want to create an active/passive set-up (Route53 will monitor the health of the primary site using a health check)

Question 14

How does the Geolocation routing policy work?

Answer 14

Geolocation routing lets you choose where your traffic will be sent based on the geographic location of your users.

Question 15

Does Route53 support zone apex records? (naked domain names)

Answer 15

Yes

Question 16

Common DNS Record Types

Answer 16

• SOA
• CNAME
• NS
• A (Address)

Question 17

Health checks

Answer 17

• You can set health checks on individual record sets
• If a record set fails a health check, it will be removed from Route 53 until it passes the health check
• You can set SNS notifications to alert you about failed health checks

Question 18

How does the Simple routing policy work?

Answer 18

You can only have one record with multiple IP addresses. If you specify multiple values in a record, Route 53 returns all values to the user in a random order

Question 19

How does the Geoproximity routing policy work?

Answer 19

• Geoproximity policy lets Amazon Route53 route traffic to your resources based on the geographic location of your users and your resources.
• You can also optionally choose to route more traffic or less to a given resource by specifying a value, known as a bias. A bias expands or shrinks the size of the geographic region from which traffic is routed to a resource.
• To use geoproximity routing, you must use Route 53 traffic flow.

Question 20

How does the Multivalue Answer routing policy work?

Answer 20

Similar to Simple Routing, but it allows you to specify multiple values and also lets you check the health of each resource, so Route 53 returns only values for healthy resources.