Table of Contents

• 1. What are we going to do?
• 2. A brief of Amazon Route 53.
• Register domain names.
• DNS routing.
• Health checking.
• Other features:
• 3. Register a domain.
• 4. Deploy static sites on EC2 instances to different regions.
• 4.1 - Create two EC2 instances in US West (N. California) and Europe (Ireland)
• 4.2 - Connect to instances and install Nginx
• 5. Create hosted zone and records
• 5.1 - Create hosted zone.
• 5.1 - Create records.
• 6. Conclusion.

1. What are we going to do?

• First of all, we will explore some basic knowledge about Amazon Route 53 to understand what is it and it's features.

• Then we will start by creating two EC2 instances in different regions and deploying simple static websites on them.

• Next, we'll register a domain and use Route 53 to handle routing when users visit the site through the registered domain.

• For example, if users are near region A, their requests will be routed to the EC2 instance in region A, while users closer to region B will have their requests routed to the EC2 instance in region B.

2. A brief of Amazon Route 53.

Amazon Route 53 is a highly and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. We can use Route 53 to perform three main functions in any combination: domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking.

Register domain names.

• If you want your websites to be visible on the Internet and easily accessible to everyone, you need a domain name to serve as an alias for the IP address. In this case, Route 53 can help you register and manage your domain name.

• If you want to learn more how domain registration work, you can find it here.

DNS routing.

• What happens when a user opens a web browser and enters your domain name or subdomain name in the address bar?

• In short, while many steps are involved, Route 53 plays a key role in connecting the browser to your website or web application by resolving the domain name to the correct IP address.

Health checking.

• Route 53 sends automated requests over the internet to a resource, such as web server, to verify that it's reachable, available, and functional.

• You can choose to receive notifications when a resources becomes unavailable and choose to route internet traffic away from unhealthy resources.

Other features:

• Route 53 Resolver, Resolver on Outpost, Resolver DNS Firewall, Traffic flow, Route 53 profiles.

3. Register a domain.

• As I mentioned, Route 53 allows us to register a new domain name, and it's very easy by following these steps:

Big Note:

• Your domain is not free, and you will need to pay for it depending on the top-level domain (TLD), such as .com or .org.

• Another type of fee you will incur is for a hosted zone, which is a container for DNS records that define how you route traffic for your domain. The cost is $0.50 per hosted zone per month.

• So if you're registering a domain for learning purposes and want to avoid hosted zone charges, make sure to delete the hosted zones after finishing your labs.

4. Deploy static sites on EC2 instances to different regions.

Why deploy to different regions?

=> Because it improves latency by placing servers close to users, ensuring faster access. It also enhances availability by providing redundancy in case one region experiences an outage.

4.1 - Create two EC2 instances in US West (N. California) and Europe (Ireland)

• For instructions on how to create an EC2 instance in the free tier, you can refer to my previous post here.

• And here are the two instances that I created.

4.2 - Connect to instances and install Nginx

• To connect to EC2 instance you can follow this guide:

• Here I connected to instances:

• Install nginx on EC2 instances:

• This article focuses on how Route 53 routes requests to different EC2 instances. I then modified the index.html file in the /usr/share/nginx/html folder of Nginx to demonstrate the behavior when a client requests from a location near the instances.

• Let's change the content of index.html file:

5. Create hosted zone and records

5.1 - Create hosted zone.

• You move to Route 53 service and then click Create hosted zone .

• Enter your domain name and check Public hosted zone (for routing traffic on the internet) then click create.

• Here is created hosted zone.

Big Note (for public hosted zone)

• Whenever you recreated a hosted zone and map to your registered domain, you need to update the Name servers of the registered domain by matching it with hosted zone Name servers like this:

5.1 - Create records.

• Each record defines how you want Route 53 to response to DNS queries.

• Here we will create two records, one for instance at US West (N. California) and one for instance at Europe (Ireland). As you can see we have some important configuration here:

  • Record type: A - Routes traffic to an IPv4 address and some AWS resources (for more detail record types, you can find here)
  • Routing policy: Latency (you can read more about routing policy here)

• Let's check our sites by using VNP and entering the domain into browser address bar.

6. Conclusion.

• In this post, we covered the basics of Amazon Route 53, explored its features, and created a demo on how to configure hosted zones and records. I hope this article provides useful insights and helps you better understand Amazon Route 53.

See you in the next posts. Happy Coding!