4 ms·

Can you use AWS53 latency, failover and geolocation for sites not hosted on EC2?

markgavalda 11y ago
Yes you can.
tobltobs 11y ago
Yes and no. You can use it, but with latency the only way to specify the location of your servers is by relating them to a AWS region [1]. This works more or less. Rather less for us-west [2]. For a simple failover this shouldn't matter. [1] AWS Regions: ap-northeast-1: Asia Pacific (Tokyo) ap-southeast-1: Asia Pacific (Singapore) ap-southeast-2: Asia Pacific (Sydney) eu-central-1: EU (Frankfurt) eu-west-1: EU (Ireland) sa-east-1: South America (Sao Paulo) us-east-1: US East (N. Virginia) us-west-1: US West (N. California) us-west-2: US West (Oregon) [2] For me the most parts of the US are mapped to us-east, even most part of the west coast. However, I am a noob in regards to DNS routing realities.
- revertts 11y ago
  This. In general, you want to be measuring the latency directly to the resources you're routing to - the Internet's a screwy place, and latency to an AWS datacenter in Virginia might not match latency to your datacenter nearish Virginia. AWS provides a latency dataset for their infrastructure, but I'd probably stick to geo if I'm routing to resources not actually on their infra. Other providers (eg. NS1) offer more ways to feed data into their system, so you may be able to create your own latency dataset and ship it off to them to use as a routing policy. Most large companies have built similar looking systems for tracking client latency to their DCs (look up Facebook's sonar/cartographer for an example). Synthetic, backbone monitoring like pingdom/gomez/etc. is usually not as useful for latency routing as RUM metrics. Edit: And to be clear, failover and geo have no ties whatsoever to running on EC2. They're also common features across managed DNS providers, so it'd be very easy to run the same config across multiple providers for redundancy or migrate off of R53 without lockin (check out Netflix's denominator library).
pliu 11y ago
If you are looking for these kinds of features outside of AWS, check out NS1 or Dyn.

Yes you can.

Yes and no. You can use it, but with latency the only way to specify the location of your servers is by relating them to a AWS region [1]. This works more or less. Rather less for us-west [2]. For a simple failover this shouldn't matter. [1] AWS Regions: ap-northeast-1: Asia Pacific (Tokyo) ap-southeast-1: Asia Pacific (Singapore) ap-southeast-2: Asia Pacific (Sydney) eu-central-1: EU (Frankfurt) eu-west-1: EU (Ireland) sa-east-1: South America (Sao Paulo) us-east-1: US East (N. Virginia) us-west-1: US West (N. California) us-west-2: US West (Oregon) [2] For me the most parts of the US are mapped to us-east, even most part of the west coast. However, I am a noob in regards to DNS routing realities.

revertts 11y ago
This. In general, you want to be measuring the latency directly to the resources you're routing to - the Internet's a screwy place, and latency to an AWS datacenter in Virginia might not match latency to your datacenter nearish Virginia. AWS provides a latency dataset for their infrastructure, but I'd probably stick to geo if I'm routing to resources not actually on their infra. Other providers (eg. NS1) offer more ways to feed data into their system, so you may be able to create your own latency dataset and ship it off to them to use as a routing policy. Most large companies have built similar looking systems for tracking client latency to their DCs (look up Facebook's sonar/cartographer for an example). Synthetic, backbone monitoring like pingdom/gomez/etc. is usually not as useful for latency routing as RUM metrics. Edit: And to be clear, failover and geo have no ties whatsoever to running on EC2. They're also common features across managed DNS providers, so it'd be very easy to run the same config across multiple providers for redundancy or migrate off of R53 without lockin (check out Netflix's denominator library).

pliu 11y ago

If you are looking for these kinds of features outside of AWS, check out NS1 or Dyn.