The Domain Name System and Network Routing: Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront

The Domain Name System (DNS) is responsible for mapping human‐readable domain names to one or more machine‐readable Internet Protocol addresses. This chapter defines the key elements of DNS infrastructure, particularly the way they're used in Amazon Route 53. Amazon's Route 53 is built to manage domain services, but it can also have a significant impact on the precision, reliability, and speed with which resources are delivered. Route 53 provides more than just basic DNS services. In fact, it focuses on four distinct areas: domain registration, DNS management, availability monitoring (health checks), and traffic management (routing policies). Amazon's global content delivery network CloudFront can help solve one of the primary problems addressed by Route 53: getting one's content into the hands of their users as quickly as possible.