Amazon Route 53 offers a powerful set of routing policies to control how DNS queries are resolved. Choosing the right one can improve your app's performance, availability, and resilience.
Let’s break down the 8 Route 53 routing policies, explain how they work, and when to use each—with real-world examples.
1️⃣ Simple Routing
🧠 What It Does:
Basic one-to-one routing to a single resource (like an EC2 instance, load balancer, or S3 website).
📦 Use Case:
- Static website hosted in S3
- Single-region application
🔧 Example:
example.com → 192.0.2.1
2️⃣ Weighted Routing
🧠 What It Does:
Distributes traffic across multiple resources based on assigned weights.
📦 Use Case:
- Canary deployments or gradual traffic shifting
- Load testing a new version of your app
🔧 Example:
80% traffic → us-east-1
20% traffic → eu-west-1
3️⃣ Latency-based Routing
🧠 What It Does:
Routes users to the region with the lowest latency (fastest response time).
📦 Use Case:
- Global applications hosted in multiple AWS regions
- Want users to reach the nearest AWS location for performance
🔧 Example:
User in Germany → eu-central-1
User in US → us-east-1
4️⃣ Geolocation Routing
🧠 What It Does:
Routes traffic based on the user’s country or continent (from IP geolocation).
📦 Use Case:
- Content localization or compliance-based routing
- Serve different pages or services based on region
🔧 Example:
Users from India → india.example.com
Users from US → us.example.com
5️⃣ Geo-proximity Routing (with Route 53 Traffic Flow)
🧠 What It Does:
Routes traffic based on proximity to a location, and allows bias adjustments to influence routing.
📦 Use Case:
- Control traffic at fine-tuned geographic boundaries
- Regional load balancing with control over percentage shifts
🔧 Example:
Shift 10% of EU traffic to the US by biasing
Germany → eu-west-1 (unless biased)
⚠️ Requires Route 53 Traffic Flow and Route 53 health checks
6️⃣ Failover Routing
🧠 What It Does:
Routes traffic to a primary resource, and fails over to a secondary resource if the primary is unhealthy.
📦 Use Case:
- High availability architectures
- Active-passive failover setups
🔧 Example:
Primary: EC2 in us-east-1
Secondary: EC2 in us-west-2
🌐 Multivalue Answer Routing (MVA)
🧠 What it does:
When a DNS query comes in, Route 53 returns multiple healthy IP addresses (A records) from a set.
- The client (browser or OS) picks one to connect to.
- Think of it like a mini load balancer inside DNS.
✅ When to Use:
- You have multiple endpoints (e.g., EC2 instances or on-prem servers).
- You want basic load balancing and redundancy without setting up an ELB.
- Useful for non-HTTP apps, like game servers, IoT, or UDP-based services.
🔧 Example:
You configure:
example.com → [192.0.2.1, 192.0.2.2, 192.0.2.3]
If one goes down, Route 53 health checks exclude it from responses.
🔍 Analogy:
It’s like saying: “Here are 3 doors—try one of them. If one’s broken, pick another.”
8️⃣ IP-based Routing (New)
🧠 What it does:
Routes traffic based on the specific IP address or range of the user making the DNS request.
You define rules like:
192.168.0.0/24 → VIP server
10.0.0.0/8 → corporate access route
Think of this as personalized DNS routing based on user identity (via IP).
✅ When to Use:
- You want to segregate users by IP (e.g., premium vs free users).
- You want to route corporate vs public traffic differently.
- You need custom logic per region, ISP, or customer base at the IP level.
🔧 Example:
If user's IP is 203.0.113.0/24 → route to vip.example.com
Else → route to standard.example.com
🔍 Analogy:
It’s like a VIP airport lane: “If your IP matches a list, go to the express route.
💬 Final Thoughts
Choosing the right routing policy can improve performance, resilience, and user experience. Often, combining multiple policies (e.g., failover + latency) gives the best results.
Have you used Route 53 in a creative or complex architecture?
Drop a comment or like if you found this breakdown helpful!
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