Route 53 Introduction

“Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.”

I think this definition is pretty clear. Route 53 is a DNS service. What is a DNS service? It is a service that translates domain names into IP addresses, and as you may know, computers are better at working with IP addresses than they are working with names. However, we mortals prefer names instead, as they are easier to remember.

When would I use Route 53?

Well, imagine you wanted you host your shiny new website. You’ve started a small business, or maybe even a startup 🦄 and you wish to launch you website to AWS. You followed the EC2 tutorial on our blog to create your new server. However it leaves you with a disgustingly long URL which doesn’t have anything to do with your brand name. What do you do? You head over to Route 53, and you purchase a new domain name! (Well, theoretically you buy one anywhere but for the purposes of this guide let’s assume you buy one on AWS).

You can also bind your domain name to an S3 bucket to give your users/developers a fancy schmancy url to access files.

That’s it. That’s the article. I’m not going to go much deeper into this service for now.

See ya! 👋