Amazon Route 53 features

Amazon Route 53 has a simple web-services interface that lets you get started in minutes. Your DNS records are organized into “hosted zones” that you configure with Route 53’s API. To use Route 53, you simply:

• Subscribe to the service by clicking on the sign-up button on this page.

• Create a hosted zone that can store DNS records for your domain. Upon creating the hosted zone, you receive six Route 53 name servers across different Top-Level Domains (TLDs) to help ensure a high level of availability

• Your hosted zone will be initially populated with a basic set of DNS records, including four virtual name servers that will answer queries for your domain. You can add, delete or change records in this set using the Amazon Management Console or by calling the ChangeResourceRecordSetAPI.

• Inform the registrar to update the name servers for your domain to the ones associated with your hosted zone.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a globally distributed service that is foundational to the way people use the Internet. DNS uses a hierarchical name structure, and different levels in the hierarchy are each separated with a dot ( . ). Consider the domain names www.amazonaws.cn and docs.amazonaws.cn. In both these examples, “cn” is the Top-Level Domain and “amazonaws” the Second-Level Domain. There can be any number of lower levels (e.g., “www” and “docs”) below the Second-Level Domain. Computers use the DNS hierarchy to translate human readable names like www.amazonaws.cn into the IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to one another.

Route 53 is an “authoritative DNS” system. An authoritative DNS system provides an update mechanism that developers use to manage their public DNS names. It then answers DNS queries, translating domain names into IP address so computers can communicate with each other.

The name for our service (Route 53) comes from the fact that DNS servers respond to queries on port 53 and provide answers that route end users to your applications on the Internet. In the future, we will add additional routing capabilities to Route 53 to better help your users find the best way to your website or application.

Route 53 provides a simple set of APIs that make it easy to create and manage DNS records for your domains. You can call these directly; all this functionality can also be accessed via the Amazon Management Console. For a full list of the available Route 53 APIs, please see the Amazon Route 53 API Reference Guide. Some of the most commonly used APIs and their functionality are listed below:

• CreateHostedZone: Creates a new hosted zone to contain your DNS data. After creating a Hosted Zone, you receive four name servers to which you can delegate your domain.

• GetHostedZone: Lists information about a specific hosted zone.

• DeleteHostedZone: Deletes a hosted zone.

• ChangeResourceRecordSets: Populates and edits the DNS resource records in a hosted zone.

• ListResourceRecordSets: Retrieves either all the resource record sets in a hosted zone or filtered by record name and type.

See our Technical Documentation for more detailed information about these APIs.

Your use of this service is subject to the Western Cloud Data Customer Agreement for Amazon Web Services (Ningxia Region).