Route 53 Routing Policies

Policy What it does
Simple Simple DNS response by 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 are in (eg US) routes to closest location
Geoproximity Routes you to the closest region within geographic area
Latency Directs you based on the lowest latency routes
Multivalue answer Returns several IP addresses and functions as a basic load balancer
Weighted Uses the relative weights assigned to resources to determine which route to

  • Simple

    • An A record is mapped to one or more IP addresses.
    • Uses round robin
    • Does not support health checks.

  • Failover:

    • Failover to a secondary IP address.
    • Associated with a health check
    • Used for active-passive
    • Can be used with an ELB.

  • Geolocation:

    • Caters to different users in different countries and different languages.
    • Contains users within a specific geography and offers them a customized version of the workloads based on their specific needs.
    • Geolocation can be used for localizing the content and presenting some or all of your website in the language of the users.
    • Can also protect distribution rights.
    • Can be used for spreading load evenly between regions.
    • If you have multiple records for overlapping regions,Route 53 will route to the smallest geographic region.

  • Geoproximity:

    • Use for routing the traffic based on the location of resources and optionally shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another.

  • Latency Based Routing:

    • AWS maintains a database of latency from different parts of the world.
    • Focused on improving performance by routing to the region with the lowest latency.

  • Multi-value answer:

    • Use for responding to the DNS queries with upto 8 healthy records selected at random.

  • Weighted:

    • Similar to simple but you can specify a weight per IP address.
      • You create records that have same name and type and assign each record a relative weight.