# Amazon Route 53

> AWS's DNS service: it turns your domain name into the address of your servers.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: AWS
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/amazon-route-53/
- In Spanish: [Amazon Route 53](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/amazon-route-53/)

**Route 53** is the AWS service for DNS, the system that translates a name like `example.com` into an IP address. You register a domain or bring one, create a **hosted zone** for it, and add **records**: 'the website is at this CloudFront distribution', 'mail goes to this server', 'the API is at this load balancer'. When someone types your domain, Route 53 answers in a few milliseconds from servers spread around the world.

Beyond plain name-to-address answers, it can route traffic cleverly: send users to the closest Region (latency routing), split them 90/10 between two versions of a site (weighted routing), or check that a server is healthy and stop sending people to it when it is not (**health checks** with failover). The name is a nod to port 53, the port DNS uses.

A typical example: a startup buys `miapp.com` through Route 53, points `www` at Amazon CloudFront, `api` at a load balancer in front of Amazon EC2, and sets a failover so that if the main Region goes down, traffic moves to a backup. It costs roughly half a dollar per hosted zone per month plus a small fee per million queries.

## An analogy

A phone book that updates itself. You look up a name, it gives you the number, and if that line is down it quietly gives you the backup number instead.

## Keep in mind

- A hosted zone holds the DNS records for one domain.
- Routing policies: simple, weighted, latency, geolocation, failover.
- Health checks let it stop pointing users at a server that is down.
- You can register domains here too, but any registrar works with it.

## Go deeper

- [What is Amazon Route 53? (official docs)](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/Welcome.html)
- [Amazon Route 53](https://aws.amazon.com/route53/)

## Related terms

- [DNS](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/dns/): The internet's phone book: it turns names like wikipedia.org into IP addresses.
- [IP address](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/ip-address/): The number that identifies a device on a network, like a postal address.
- [Amazon CloudFront](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/amazon-cloudfront/): AWS's CDN: copies of your content kept close to users all over the world.
- [Server](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/server/): A computer whose job is to answer requests from other computers, all day, every day.
- [API](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/api/): The menu of things one program lets another program ask for.
- [Load balancer](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/load-balancer/): The traffic cop that spreads incoming requests across many servers.
- [Regions and Availability Zones](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/regions-and-availability-zones/): Where AWS physically lives: cities worldwide, each split into separate data centers.
- [Bandwidth and latency](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/bandwidth-and-latency/): How much data fits per second, and how long each trip takes. Two different things.