Route53: the AWS-only, all-in-one DNS service
April 05, 2019

Route53: the AWS-only, all-in-one DNS service

Dylan Cauwels | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Route 53

Route53 is an easily accessible and simple DNS service that's integrated with AWS. We use Route53 for any web applications that we deploy and I have used Route53 for all of my personal projects that need DNS routing. While it does lack some control when routing traffic to resources outside of AWS, it solves any tangible need for AWS-hosted applications.
  • 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.
  • With non-AWS infrastructure, you're limited to simple DNS records and a restricted set of features compare to AWS deployments.
  • Route53 does cost more than competitors such as Namecheap or GoDaddy, making it a poor choice if used with infrastructure not hosted on AWS.
  • Allowed flexibility with our web apps, giving us routing and failover options that could be customized to a satisfying degree.
  • Took a long time to migrate off of when we moved some of our web applications to Azure; would've been preferable to simply switch the url endpoints instead of transferring the domain name itself.
Route53 was used because I initially thought we were going to have our infrastructure on AWS. Once our team transitioned to Google Cloud, I was left scrambling to migrate our DNS solution to point to those servers instead. Because there is a mandatory 45-day transfer wait period for hostnames, I had to route traffic through an S3 bucket because Route53 would not point to the server endpoint directly.
Great when used with AWS infrastructure. It gives you additional features and permissions that you do not get when you use Route53 with outside applications. This is the end-all be-all for using Route53, as all of its pros are lost when you migrate your resources outside of AWS and have to use its handicapped capabilities.