Amazon Route 53 features

Latency based routing
Route end users to the Amazon Web Services China regions that provides the lowest possible latency.

IP-based routing
Fine-tune your DNS routing approach based on the Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block that the query-originating IP address belongs to.
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Private DNS for Amazon VPC
Manage custom domain names for your internal Amazon Web Services resources without exposing DNS data to the public Internet.
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DNS Failover
Automatically route your website visitors to an alternate location to avoid site outages.

Health Checks and Monitoring
Amazon Route 53 can monitor the health and performance of your application as well as your web servers and other resources.

DNSSEC
Enable DNSSEC validation for Amazon Route 53 Resolver.

CloudFront Zone Apex Support
When using Amazon CloudFront to deliver your website content, visitors to your website can now access your site at the zone apex (or "root domain"). For example, your site can be accessed as example.com instead of www.example.com.

Amazon ELB Integration
Amazon Route 53 is integrated with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

Management Console
Amazon Route 53 works with the Amazon Management Console. This web-based, point-and-click, graphical user interface lets you manage Amazon Route 53 without writing any code at all.

Weighted Round Robin
Amazon Route 53 offers Weighted Round Robin (WRR) functionality.

Resolver
Get recursive DNS for your Amazon VPC and on-premises networks. Create conditional forwarding rules and DNS endpoints to resolve custom names mastered in Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones or in your on-premises DNS servers.
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Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall
Protect your recursive DNS queries within the Route 53 Resolver. Create domain lists and build firewall rules that filter outbound DNS traffic against these rules.
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Amazon Route 53 has a simple web-services interface that lets you get started in minutes. Your DNS records are organized into “hosted zones” that you configure with Route 53’s API. To use Route 53, you simply:

• Subscribe to the service by clicking on the sign-up button on this page.
• Create a hosted zone that can store DNS records for your domain. Upon creating the hosted zone, you receive six Route 53 name servers across different Top-Level Domains (TLDs) to help ensure a high level of availability
• Your hosted zone will be initially populated with a basic set of DNS records, including four virtual name servers that will answer queries for your domain. You can add, delete or change records in this set using the Amazon Management Console or by calling the ChangeResourceRecordSetAPI.
• Inform the registrar to update the name servers for your domain to the ones associated with your hosted zone.
  

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a globally distributed service that is foundational to the way people use the Internet. DNS uses a hierarchical name structure, and different levels in the hierarchy are each separated with a dot ( . ). Consider the domain names www.amazonaws.cn and docs.amazonaws.cn. In both these examples, “cn” is the Top-Level Domain and “amazonaws” the Second-Level Domain. There can be any number of lower levels (e.g., “www” and “docs”) below the Second-Level Domain. Computers use the DNS hierarchy to translate human readable names like www.amazonaws.cn into the IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to one another.

Route 53 is an “authoritative DNS” system. An authoritative DNS system provides an update mechanism that developers use to manage their public DNS names. It then answers DNS queries, translating domain names into IP address so computers can communicate with each other.

The name for our service (Route 53) comes from the fact that DNS servers respond to queries on port 53 and provide answers that route end users to your applications on the Internet. In the future, we will add additional routing capabilities to Route 53 to better help your users find the best way to your website or application.

Route 53 provides a simple set of APIs that make it easy to create and manage DNS records for your domains. You can call these directly; all this functionality can also be accessed via the Amazon Management Console. For a full list of the available Route 53 APIs, please see the Amazon Route 53 API Reference Guide. Some of the most commonly used APIs and their functionality are listed below:

• CreateHostedZone: Creates a new hosted zone to contain your DNS data. After creating a Hosted Zone, you receive four name servers to which you can delegate your domain.
• GetHostedZone: Lists information about a specific hosted zone.
• DeleteHostedZone: Deletes a hosted zone.
• ChangeResourceRecordSets: Populates and edits the DNS resource records in a hosted zone.
• ListResourceRecordSets: Retrieves either all the resource record sets in a hosted zone or filtered by record name and type.

See our Technical Documentation for more detailed information about these APIs.

Your use of this service is subject to the Western Cloud Data Customer Agreement for Amazon Web Services (Ningxia Region).