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Simple, Failover Routing and Geo Location Routing in AWS Route 53

Application Based Stickyness in ALB in AWS

1) Simple Routing

Simple routing lets you configure standard DNS records, with no special Route 53 routing such as weighted or latency. With simple routing, you typically route traffic to a single resource, for example, to a web server for your website.

You can use simple routing policy for records in a private hosted zone.

If you choose the simple routing policy in the Route 53 console, you can’t create multiple records that have the same name and type, but you can specify multiple values in the same record, such as multiple IP addresses. (If you choose the simple routing policy for an alias record, you can specify only one AWS resource or one record in the current hosted zone.) If you specify multiple values in a record, Route 53 returns all values to the recursive resolver in random order, and the resolver returns the values to the client (such as a web browser) that submitted the DNS query. The client then chooses a value and resubmits the query. With simple routing policy, although you can specify multiple IP addresses, these IP addresses are not health checked.

2) Failover routing

Failover routing lets you route traffic to a resource when the resource is healthy or to a different resource when the first resource is unhealthy. The primary and secondary records can route traffic to anything from an Amazon S3 bucket that is configured as a website to a complex tree of records.

Values specific for failover records

Below are some Important Values that you specify in Failover Record
TTL(Seconds)

The amount of time, in seconds, that you want DNS recursive resolvers to cache information about this record. If you specify a longer value (for example, 172800 seconds, or two days), you reduce the number of calls that DNS recursive resolvers must make to Route 53 to get the latest information in this record. This has the effect of reducing latency and reducing your bill for Route 53 service.

Failover Record Type

Choose the applicable value for this record. For failover to function correctly, you must create one primary and one secondary failover record. You can’t create non-failover records that have the same values for Record name and Record type as failover records.

Health Check

Select a health check if you want Route 53 to check the health of a specified endpoint and to respond to DNS queries using this record only when the endpoint is healthy.

Route 53 doesn’t check the health of the endpoint specified in the record, for example, the endpoint specified by the IP address in the Value field. When you select a health check for a record, Route 53 checks the health of the endpoint that you specified in the health check.

Record ID

Enter a value that uniquely identifies the primary and secondary records.

3) Geo Location Routing

Geolocation routing lets you choose the resources that serve your traffic based on the geographic location of your users, meaning the location that DNS queries originate from. For example, you might want all queries from Europe to be routed to an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer in the Frankfurt Region.

Some values Specified for Geo Location Records

When you configure Route 53 to respond to DNS queries based on the location that the queries originated from, select the continent or country for which you want Route 53 to respond with the settings in this record.

For individual states in the United States,select United States from the Location list, and then select the state under the Sublocation group.