Major Update for Amazon Route 53

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Great news for anyone utilizing Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) service to host websites. Amazon Web Services has released an update for their DNS service, Route 53, that allows clients to alias their ELB to a zone file.

A common complaint for those who currently utilize ELB’s to front a website hosted on EC2 is the inability to resolve your website in DNS without a subdomain prefix such as www.example.com. This is due to AWS ELBs not having a static IP address you can create an A-Record entry, you must use a CNAME.

Now your problems are solved! (almost.) If you are using Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service you can now create an alias entry which allows you to resolve your domain without a subdomain. If you do not use Route 53 you will need to utilize a DNS service that provides 301 redirects.

In addition to a 60 second TTL on these alias DNS entries, which provides a quick turn-around should you change your ELB, Route 53 now provides for weighted-round-robin in load-balancing. Using this you can setup for various scenarios such as one ELB with larger instances behind it handling more traffic than another ELB fronting smaller instances.

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