Amazon Route 53 is a Cloud Domain Name System (DNS) offered by Amazon AWS as a reliable way to route visitors to web applications and other site traffic to locations within a company's infrastructure, which can be configured to monitor the health and performance of traffic and endpoints in the network.
BlueCat Integrity is BlueCat’s core offering, comprised of BlueCat Address Manager, an IP address management application, and authoritative DNS and DHCP servers.
- Routing users to the closest or best-performing resources: Route 53 allows you to use geolocation and latency-based routing to route users to the resources that will give them the best performance. - Load balancing: Route 53 can be used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances or Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) tasks, to improve the availability and scalability of your application. - Managing domain names: Route 53 can be used to register domain names and manage DNS records, making it a one-stop solution for managing your domain name and routing traffic to your resources. Scenarios where Route 53 is less appropriate include:Applications with very high query rates: Route 53 is designed to handle millions of queries per second, but if your application generates an extremely high query rate, you may need to use a specialized DNS service.Applications that require very low latency: Route 53 is designed to provide low-latency DNS service, but if your application requires ultra-low latency, you may need to use a specialized DNS service or a self-hosted DNS solution.Applications that require advanced security features: Route 53 provides basic security features such as DNSSEC, but if your application requires advanced security features such as DDoS protection, you may need to use a specialized DNS service.
Uptime - Route53 is highly performant and available. We have had only 3-4 instances in the last 12 years when we had any downtime or outages due to Route53.
Extensive API layer on Route53 that allows integration with external tools and SDK's (Boto, Terraform, etc)
Closely integrated with the other AWS services. Makes it easy to operate the infra.
During initial setup when you are using Route 53 or DNS systems for very first time, there are little number of documentation from AWS which is kinda of little tough. But, once you get hold of it, its a cake walk for everyone.
Health checks are kinda of little costly when Compared to other big players, but that doesn't affect much when you compare its uses.
You need to know what DNS is; this is a tool built for developers who already know the technology and are just looking for a DNS management tool. The tool is very usable given that. If you're not familiar with DNS, Route53 isn't really for you and you won't find it to be very usable-- you'll need to go read the documentation, and that will start with learning what DNS is
Until today, I have never needed support to Route53 because the documentation is great. But, I have needed it for other services. And they're near perfect always. Except that they don't have Portuguese support yet and they're sometimes slow to answer (48 hours in non-critical ones, in two tickets). But usually, they're amazing!
We purchased our domain names through Networksolutions.com and do rely on their DNS services for basic functionality (SPF hard reject records, etc.), since it was included at no cost; however, for our main domains, we utilize Route 53 because of AWS's high availability, reasonable cost, and capabilities to integrate with EC2 and other security certificate services to make hosting on AWS simple. We also front-end some of our sites with Cloudflare and while it's not as streamlined as using AWS natively, it does a good job.
For all it's worth, it's a Linux based appliance and does offer a high availability design. It does offer IP address management and can scan your network through ICMP and SNMP. It does support role-based access controls for admins.
CONS: Not up to speed with market-leading virtualization technologies such as Nutanix.
PROS: Reliable solution.
PROS: The design can be confusing for the folks used to Infoblox as it utilized 1 controller called Bluecat Address Manager and the actual DNS/DHCP servers named BDDS.
