Route 53 is becoming a viable alternative to enterprise providers UltraDNS and Dyn. Performance is solid, but features have been lacking. This is a popular feature those providers charge $100+/mo for versus $0.75/mo on Route 53. Monitoring capabilities are limited (tcp and basic http only), but for many this is probably sufficient. DNSSEC is another feature I hope they will support in the future.

A few months back I wrote a blog post on the topic of managed DNS provider comparisons (performance, market share, price, features, network size, etc.):

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis...

Read that post. So http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/services/global-traffic-director/ this service is zone based and not geo-ip ?

Correct - it is based on the IP anycast endpoint a resolver connects to, not the geo data associated with the resolver's IP.

Fantastic write up, I learned a few things as well! Would really like to see the updated post with CloudFlare data & anything you find with the new Route53 feature also.

Do you have any thoughts on Rackspace DNS (http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/dns/)? It's free.

It is very basic - anycast endpoints in US and UK only, and no extra features like failover or geographic load balancing.

Yet. ;)

More details can be found in my blog post at http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/02/create-a-backup-website-u... .

isn't this offering cannibalizing AWS load balancers? if I have a set of web servers with a load balancer at front and health checks that takes unhealthy nodes out of rotation, isn't it cheaper now to just use this DNS fail-over?

http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/elasticloadbalancing/ http://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/

Not really - DNS failover is typically much slower to respond compared to load balancing because records are cached.

ELB is a local load balancer, distributing requests to local servers based on load and availability.

R53 is a global traffic manager, distributing requests to datacenters to provide failover and latency optimization.

We use DNS Made Easy but and are happy with them. However, for our level of DNS queries per month - e.g. over 50million Route 53 would give us some significant cost savings.

Do you guys know whether Route 53 offers templating mechanism? e.g. setup 1 template and apply to 50 different domains?

The AWS templating mechanism is called CloudFormation. Here's a snippet of a Route 53 template:

( http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuid... ).

No template DSL/system in the console. But there is an API with quite a few client libraries. Shouldn't be much work to whip one out. Or it may exist already, actually.

Would be nice to have the ability to set up some type of alert/notification.

Does this feature use EBS to store the state?

No, the health check system does not have a dependency on EBS. More importantly, the health checkers are highly redundant and will continue to function even in case of multiple AZ, region, service, or Internet outages.

noob question - why use load balancing if DNS failover does essentially the same thing?

DNS failover is subject to DNS caching and TTL. Load balancing is real time. A DNS driven failover may take 1-10 minutes to trigger versus instantaneous for load balancing. Good approach to failover is a combination of both.

Route 53 is slow ( For a paid solution ). At least when i tested it. It you are doing to use a Third Party DNS that you paid you are either going with the best ones or ones that are good enough like OnApp Anycast DNS.

Define slow? Which particular aspect?

We have found quite the opposite. Route 53 has been very responsive for us all around the world. Also, Route 53 has Anycast support.

Recommendations for "best"?

I personally have always liked DNS Made Easy.

Affordable, always in the top 3 for speed and lots of features.