Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely 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. Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) – such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.
Much like a phone book, the Internet’s DNS system manages mapping between names and numbers. In DNS’s case, the names are domain names (www.example.com) that are easy for your users to remember. Instead of phone numbers, in DNS, these names are mapped to IP addresses (192.0.2.1) that specify the location of computers on the Internet. Route 53 performs two DNS functions. First, it lets you manage the IP addresses listed for your domain names in the Internet’s DNSphone book. These listings are called DNS “records.” Second, like a directory assistance service, Route 53 answers requests to translate specific domain names into their corresponding IP addresses. These requests are called “queries.”
Route 53 is designed to be fast, easy to use, and cost-effective. It answers DNS queries with low latency by using a global network of DNSservers. Queries for your domain are automatically routed to the nearestDNS server, and thus answered with the best possible performance. With Route 53, you can create and manage your public DNS records with an easy-to-use API. It’s also integrated with other Amazon Web Services. For instance, by using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service with Route 53, you can control who in your organization can make changes to your DNS records. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no long-term contracts or minimum usage requirements for using Route 53 – you pay only for managing domains through the service and the number of queries that the service answers