Amazon Route 53 : Programmable DNS is finally here

Managing DNS has been considered as an art by many. If you manage your own DNS records, and run your own external DNS servers, I’m sure you have some stories to share. Unfortunately unlike most other infrastructure on the internet, DNS screw-ups can get very costly, especially because caching policies can tend to keep your mistakes alive long after you have rolled back your changes.

The unforgiving nature of DNS has forced most, except a few hardcore sys-admins, from avoiding the DNS hell and choosing a managed service to do it for them. Domain name registrars like network solutions, mydomain and godaddy already provide these DNS services, but I can’t recall any of them providing APIs to make these changes automatically. DynDNS does provide an API to change DNS mappings, but it costs15 bucks a year for a single host. There might be others which I’m not aware off, but the bottom line is that there is no standard, and its not cheap.

Customers on AWS today unfortunately have the same problem. And not surprisingly they too prefer to use 3rd party service providers to monitor, setup and manage DNS records for them.  Today AWS is announcing a new service “Amazon Route 53” which, technically, isn’t a significant breakthrough. But considering the number of users already on AWS, the demand for such a service this would be one of the biggest game changing events in the DNS world in the last decade.

The service is pretty cheap, about 12 bucks a year and gives a complete set of APIs to create, delete, modify maintain and query DNS records on this new service.

To make transition simple they even have migration tools from bind to Amazon Route 53 ready to go. Here are pointers to some more documentation if you want to get down and dirty with it.

• Getting Started Guide
• Developer Guide
• API Reference

But stop thinking of this as a simple DNS service. I can see a whole range of interesting applications being built over this service in next few months. The simplest application which I think would be built over this is a service like “Dynamic DNS service”, which would be cheap to build with Route 53 doing most of the grunt work for you.

Here is how Jeff Barr introduced this service

Today we are introducing Amazon Route 53, a programmable Domain Name Service. You can now create, modify, and delete DNS zone files for any domain that you own. You can do all of this under full program control—you can easily add and modify DNS entries in response to changing circumstances. For example, you could create a new sub-domain for each new customer of a Software as a Service (SaaS) application. DNS queries for information within your domains will be routed to a global network of 16 edge locations tuned for high availability and high performance.

Route 53 introduces a new concept called a Hosted Zone. A Hosted Zone is equivalent to a DNS zone file. It begins with the customary SOA (Start of Authority) record and can contain other records such as A (IPV4 address), AAAA (IPV6 address), CNAME (canonical name), MX (mail exchanger), NS (name server), and SPF (Sender Policy Framework). You have full control over the set of records in each Hosted Zone.

Here is some more info from Werner Vogels

Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a new service in the Amazon Web Services suite that manages DNS names and answers DNS queries. Route 53 provides Authoritative DNS functionality implemented using a world-wide network of highly-available DNS servers. Amazon Route 53 sets itself apart from other DNS services that are being offered in several ways:

A familiar cloud business model: A complete self-service environment with no sales people in the loop. No upfront commitments are necessary and you only pay for what you have used. The pricing is transparent and no bundling is required and no overage fees are charged.

Very fast update propagation times: One of the difficulties with many of the existing DNS services are the very long update propagation times, sometimes it may even take up to 24 hours before updates are received at all replicas. Modern systems require much faster update propagation to for example deal with outages. We have designed Route 53 to propagate updates very quickly and give the customer the tools to find out when all changes have been propagated.

Low-latency query resolution The query resolution functionality of Route 53 is based on anycast, which will route the request automatically to the DNS server that is the closest. This achieves very low-latency for queries which is crucial for the overall performance of internet applications. Anycast is also very robust in the presence of network or server failures as requests are automatically routed to the next closest server.

No lock-in. While we have made sure that Route 53 works really well with other Amazon services such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, it is not restricted to using it within AWS. You can use Route 53 with any of the resources and entities that you want to control, whether they are in the cloud or on premise.

We chose the name "Route 53" as a play on the fact that DNS servers respond to queries on port 53. But in the future we plan for Route 53 to also give you greater control over the final aspect of distributed system naming, the route your users take to reach an endpoint. If you want to learn more about Route 53 visithttp://aws.amazon.com/route53 and read the blog post at the AWS Developer weblog.

Here are some of the other comments on this service

• Prespective: James Hamilton’s Blog
• CloudAve