Amazon Route 53 - A New DNS Service from AWS

Very interesting. We currently use DNS Made Easy but I see two huge advantages to Route 53:<p>1. It's API-driven, so we can modify our DNS entries programmatically. You can't do that with DNS Made Easy. (They've been "planning to implement an API in the future" for a long time now.)<p>2. At our scale, it's exactly 1/4th the cost of DNS Made Easy. That'll be a nice chunk of change. Plus, like other AWS services, you only pay for the number of queries that you actually use.

As someone who uses Nettica for Dynamaic DNS (which this seems to be targeting) I think it's great that Amazon is creating some competition in this area. Not enough web developers consider Dynamic, programmable DNS and that's a shame because I think it's a must. I monitor every site I have from an external location and if there's ever a host outage I have the DNS re-routed to a backup host within 10 minutes (it doesn't always propagate as quickly as I like but there's little that can be done about that)<p>I'm happy with Nettica but Amazon's offering will draw attention to this important point. Plus competition leads to more features, better service and so on.

Amazon got a lot less interesting in the last couple of weeks, I hear they will take down your site without so much as a warrant.

Here's hoping that this is the first step towards making ELB actually usable -- i.e. dropping the requirement that you must point a CNAME at the ELB hostname, which prevents you from using a zone's root record (you can balance www.foo.com but not foo.com). To wit:<p><i>In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name</i><p>As demonstrated by <a href="https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=32044" rel="nofollow">https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=32044</a>, lots of people want this.

Routing traffic to wikileaks would have been a perfect demonstration of this new system. Instead they decided to show how much they respect freedom of speech.<p>And tptacek, yes we should speak about wikileaks when discussing Amazon, from now on. This isn't a fanboy site, this is a place to discuss the real ramifications of a company's actions.

Does anybody else think $1/Mo a zone/domain is high? Sure its nice that a million queries is only going to run you $0.50, but I suspect most people have a lot of domains, but little queries. Makes sense if you have a single domain, that gets a boat load of DNS requests, but if you have a lot of domains, with very little requests, its not cost effective.

if anyone is wondering about the name, 53 is the port that dns operates over.

There's no mention of IPv6 support. Given the situation that IPv4 addresses will be running out shortly, it'd be nice to see some acknowledgment of forward-thinking IPv6 plans.<p>edit: sorry to be so out of step - I guess I should have tied wikileaks to ipv6 to fit in with the rest of the comments.

Say what you want about the whole Wikileaks affair, but regardless of where you stand, Amazon's sense of timing seems really bad. Couldn't they at least have waited a week after they declined to host Wikileaks?<p>People will undoubtedly tie the two things together, and Wikileaks supporters will make a big effort to point out Amazon's recent misstep.<p>I would probably have waited just a couple of days or weeks before this recent event was out of most people's minds.

If you like AWS or not: It's not a good idea to have everything in one account.<p>It's a single point of failiure anway and you want to distribute your core infrastructure between different parties. It's cool to run a DNS by AWS but not cool if you don't have mirrors/secondary nameservers, too.

I hope they eventually build in the ability to do location based DNS load balancing. For me that would be a killer feature.

A big reason this is important is that it's a stepping stone to location based DNS routing. That'd be the very last showstopper for some deployments being exclusively AWS.

This combined with the recently rolled out SSL termination in the Elastic Load Balancer product (<a href="http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/10/elastic-load-balancer-support-for-ssl-termination.html" rel="nofollow">http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/10/elastic-load-balancer-sup...</a>) makes supporting custom domains a cinch.

"It is designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other."<p>Maybe this isn't a big deal, but wouldn't someone who needs a DNS service either already know this or have a developer or IT guy who has explained to them why they need a DNS service?

Amazon should add a feature for geographic load balancing that could compliment their aws locations

Great, so now they can also switch off your DNS if they don't like what you are hosting.

<p><pre><code> DJ Bernstein TinyDNS 1.05 </code></pre> Anycast djbdns, nice :)

Can anyone explain what this hosted zone part is, I must be too sleepy or am just missing what it is.

I take it Wikileaks won't be using this as their DNS provider.

We're very happy Zerigo DNS customers. Great API, great infrastructure, great support.

I'm excited about the API available for AWS 53, but I just love the old crusty looking Zone Edit. <a href="http://legacy.zoneedit.com" rel="nofollow">http://legacy.zoneedit.com</a><p>If you're dealing with low volume DNS for a couple domains, Zone Edit is hard to beat.

Did anyone else see "Amazon 53" and think "Amazon S3"?

It seems to me that GoDaddy does this for free? I've also used Slicehost for free.<p>Is there a difference between their free DNS offering and Amazon's paid version?

I'm currently using Zerigo. They've been awesome so probably wont switch anytime soon. Tough competition going up against AMZN for this though.

The pricing is $1/zone and 1 billion (!!) queries per month.<p>Which seems quite good for a globally hosted DNS service.<p>Only potential limitations are that its listed as "beta" and that as far as I can tell you have to use the scripts in the Route 53 developer tools (or write your own) to manipulate the zone and do the initial set up.

needs more RRSIG - I don't understand why you'd launch a new DNS product at this point without DNSSEC support.

Yeah, as if anyone wants to leave the DNS info in your hands too, Amazon, after pulling Wikileaks at a senator's call.<p>Amazon should offer domain names next, so it's just one stop for politicians who want to completely eliminate a website from the web when they feel like it.

$0.50 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month<p>$0.25 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month<p>bleh.

What's the big deal here? Linode provides me all of the DNS I need.

One thing I couldn't find is if it supports wildcard DNS (granted I only did a quick in page search both here and the service description page). Anyone have any insight?

Is there any performance reason to use this as DNS as opposed to the DNS servers on register.com for just a regular web site?

This is awful timing on their part, re: wikileaks, and talks of decentralised DNS safe from politics.

Would love to see some reliability and speed metrics in the coming weeks as adoption increases!

It would be nice if they added this service to their management console; I'm lazy.

It would be nice if they supported vanity nameservers.

Finally! I've been wanting this for AGES!