Amazon Route 53 vs NGINX

• Route53's UI is quite simple and can be understood and manipulated within minutes of introduction.
• Route53 is globally scalable and customizable, allowing you to set intuitive fail overs and routing based on latency, location, random, or set policies.
• With AWS-hosted infrastructure, Route53 allows for a special set of alias records with extended privileges to simplify your DNS solution.

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• Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
• Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
• SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
• Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.

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• Price, it is not expensive ... but you can find some cheaper and even free DNS solutions.
• If you use non-AWS infrastructure, Route 53 doesn't have significant advantages on other services.
• AWS Route 53 does not support forwarding or conditional forwarding options for domains used on an on-premise network.

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• Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
• I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
• It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
• It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
• I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.

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• Kept our domains running, no issues with downtime or affecting our end customers.
• Enabled us to save time running static websites via routing a domain to an S3 Bucket.
• With various time to live settings, we're able to make DNS changes and have them go live pretty quickly.

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• Improved the reliability of our site. Before using Nginx, with Apache as our app server, there were times when we had to manually go in and restart Apache to bring the site back online. We've never had to do that with Nginx.
• Made our web server more memory efficient -- Nginx has a very small memory footprint, on the order of under 100 MB. This makes it suitable even for cheap VPS machines.
• The Nginx community provides online examples of configurations, so it saves us time in writing the config files from scratch.

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