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Amazon Route 53 - A New DNS Service from AWS
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- wwortiz 16y agoCan anyone explain what this hosted zone part is, I must be too sleepy or am just missing what it is.
- zbailey 16y agoI believe a hosted zone simply corresponds to a single domain you want to host the DNS for. If you've ever ran your own DNS server this would be equivalent to a "zone file": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_file http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_file
- dabeeeenster 16y agoIf I wanted to point www.domain.com and svn.domain.com to separate IP's, would both of these count as a single domain or would I need to pay for two?
- dangrossman 16y agoThose would be part of one zone, the domain.com namespace.
- nphase 16y agoI take it Wikileaks won't be using this as their DNS provider.
- TomOfTTB 16y agoOh for God's sakes let it be. If you want to boycott Amazon then Fine. Do it. No one's stopping you. But don't spam other threads with your political views.
- cma 16y agoA hidden boycott? Doesn't make a lot of sense.
- pyre 16y agoDepends on your aim. If you are voting with your wallet and you want Amazon to know why, then spamming these threads doesn't do a lot of good. If you are boycotting and you want to recruit others to do so, then spamming these treads does do a lot of good (for you, the boycotter), but in the end it is a solicitation.
- cma 16y agoI agree with his "don't spam other threads" (and I think a real spamming would make any boycott less effective); I just don't think the comment amounted to spam (which is subjective of course).
- TomOfTTB 16y agoYou can scream boycott from the top of the highest mountain for all I care. Up vote every item that posts on your boycott. Just don't disrupt every other conversation on HN.
- derefr 16y agoA "conversation" on HN is something with a diagonal shape (a comment replying to a comment replying to a comment, etc.) Adding a comment to something (a post or a comment) that already has other comments doesn't "disrupt" the conversation, it branches it. This isn't a phpBB.
- jacquesm 16y agoAmazon got a lot less interesting in the last couple of weeks, I hear they will take down your site without so much as a warrant.
- cmelbye 16y agoThey have a Terms of Service, and like (literally) every hosting provider on the planet, they will take down your site if you violate the agreement that you agreed to when you signed up.
- jacquesm 16y agoAnd like every other webhosting provider on the planet they'll have to decide when they think it is time to stand up for their customers and when to let it go. Suppose you have a newspaper and you want to co-locate, Amazon is suddenly no longer an option. Really, the speed and ease with which they rolled over after some political pressure is quite amazing to me, I had them pegged as 'solid' before.
- sliverstorm 16y agoIf they were solid in your experience in the past, perhaps this time there were special mitigating factors in this case we are not aware of, or have not recognized? One thing that pops to mind is WikiLeaks was promising to expose the secrets of all big businesses everywhere. It makes no sense whatsoever for Amazon to support someone promising to do that, unless Amazon has no secrets they wish to keep.
- olefoo 16y agoIt was somewhat craven of them, on the other hand; I can see it from their point of view Senator Lieberman can make life very difficult for them vis-a-vis local sales tax charged on goods sold across state lines. In my mind Amazon is reacting in a way that protects their short-term interests but they do not realize that they have now given a clear signal that they will cave to pressure.
- nikcub 16y ago
- 619Cloud 16y agoDoes anybody else think $1/Mo a zone/domain is high? Sure its nice that a million queries is only going to run you $0.50, but I suspect most people have a lot of domains, but little queries. Makes sense if you have a single domain, that gets a boat load of DNS requests, but if you have a lot of domains, with very little requests, its not cost effective.
- 8ig8 16y agoI was thinking the same thing upon first inspection. We have about 200 domains with DNS Made Easy. We don't even get close to the allotted queries for the account. I think we pay about $180 per year for all 200. I'll need to read up on this a bit more. It does appear to be significantly more economical to stay with DNS/ME.
- RyanGWU82 16y agoIt's a lot more favorable when you have few domains and many queries. We have many tens-of-millions of queries per month, on only two domains. This would cut 75% off our DNS hosting.
- haploid 16y agoSame here. This would be a nice little cost saver, except it appears they don't support anycast. As such, it's a nonstarter for us.
- moe 16y agoJust to clarify: All sources I've read claim it is anycast.
- jgreen10 16y ago"The query resolution functionality of Route 53 is based on anycast, which will route the request automatically to the DNS server that is the closest." http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/12/dns_amazon_route_53.html http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/12/dns_amazon_route...
- TomOfTTB 16y agoAs someone who uses Nettica for Dynamaic DNS (which this seems to be targeting) I think it's great that Amazon is creating some competition in this area. Not enough web developers consider Dynamic, programmable DNS and that's a shame because I think it's a must. I monitor every site I have from an external location and if there's ever a host outage I have the DNS re-routed to a backup host within 10 minutes (it doesn't always propagate as quickly as I like but there's little that can be done about that) I'm happy with Nettica but Amazon's offering will draw attention to this important point. Plus competition leads to more features, better service and so on.
- jrockway 16y agoWhat do you set your TTL to? Do caches actually respect it? (My experience with this is that the downtime that I want to route around usually lasts longer than the TTL. And even if it doesn't, the recursive resolver / OS cache / browser cache ends up persisting the record longer than the TTL advises.)
- TomOfTTB 16y agoActually they don't but in the opposite direction. I set it at 7200 initially just to see if it would work and found not only did it work but updates came even quicker in most cases. Google's DNS for example will update after about 10 to 20 minutes regardless of the TTL setting.
- RyanGWU82 16y agoVery interesting. We currently use DNS Made Easy but I see two huge advantages to Route 53: 1. It's API-driven, so we can modify our DNS entries programmatically. You can't do that with DNS Made Easy. (They've been "planning to implement an API in the future" for a long time now.) 2. At our scale, it's exactly 1/4th the cost of DNS Made Easy. That'll be a nice chunk of change. Plus, like other AWS services, you only pay for the number of queries that you actually use.
- plusbryan 16y agoEven more important, you won't need to solve that pesky captcha each time you wish to log in!
- dreyfiz 16y agoGod, I know.
- js2 16y agoDitto. We're making use of DME dynamic DNS updates, but it's no substitute for a real API. I'd like to be able to add/remove A records, not just adjust the IP's of existing records, which is all you can currently do with DME. The reason I do this is so I can have the root of a zone pointed at an ELB, since you can't use a CNAME for that. So I mirror the IP address(es) of the ELB into the zone root. With DME, I rotate the IP every few minutes, but with Route 53 I could publish all its IPs. (Of course, it would be nice if Route 53 was integrated with Amazon's other services so I didn't have to do this at all…)
- eli 16y agoYup, same here. DME additional query & overage fees are killing me. Has anyone tried this out though? My impression is that R53 is exclusively API driven, at least for now. I'd kinda like to have a web interface to fall back on.
- MrRumblefish 16y agoYes I've set one domain up and atm it's via API only. They do provide scripts that take care of most of the work but ther is still more involved than a web front end. For example you make changes in batches of records, and they can be create or delete. So to change an IP in an A record you make an XML document with both a delete request and a create request with the new value then poll the API for a sat us of in-sync.
- MrRumblefish 16y agoThe pricing is $1/zone and 1 billion (!!) queries per month. Which seems quite good for a globally hosted DNS service. Only potential limitations are that its listed as "beta" and that as far as I can tell you have to use the scripts in the Route 53 developer tools (or write your own) to manipulate the zone and do the initial set up.
- amock 16y agoThe pricing is $1/month and $0.50 per million queries for the first billion queries.
- MrRumblefish 16y agoMy mistake - you are correct. Its a shame - it would be nice for them to throw in a the first billion!
- chrismiller 16y agoI hope they eventually build in the ability to do location based DNS load balancing. For me that would be a killer feature.
- trotsky 16y agoneeds more RRSIG - I don't understand why you'd launch a new DNS product at this point without DNSSEC support.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoWhich record types does it support?
- mike-cardwell 16y agoAh, it's on their FAQ page - http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/ http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/ They support A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SOA, SPF, SRV, TXT, which is better than most. But I agree, why on Earth would they not support the DNSSEC record types? It's not as if it would have been any extra work for them...
- smountcastle 16y agoThey're probably using an open source authoritative DNS server which doesn't yet support DNSSEC. If they upgrade to BIND 9.7 or NSD they'll get DNSSEC support for free.
- jgreen10 16y agobecause like... the whole world uses DNSSEC right?
- mike-cardwell 16y agoWhat is your point? A significant number of people don't use DNSSEC because they're tied to DNS services which don't support it. And that is an argument for creating more services without support for it?
- jgreen10 16y agoI imagine the argument is that it's harder and they need time and it's not a critical component so it's better to bootstrap their business first. You know, entrepreneurship.
- WALoeIII 16y agoThis combined with the recently rolled out SSL termination in the Elastic Load Balancer product (http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/10/elastic-load-balancer-support-for-ssl-termination.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/10/elastic-load-balancer-sup...) makes supporting custom domains a cinch.
- j_baker 16y ago"It is designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other." Maybe this isn't a big deal, but wouldn't someone who needs a DNS service either already know this or have a developer or IT guy who has explained to them why they need a DNS service?
- jacquesm 16y agoI'd like to see how far you get on the public portion of the internet with a 192.x.x.x anyway.
- nimms 16y agoyou mean 192.168.X.X?? 192.0.X.X is a public ip address range
- jacquesm 16y agoHehe, oops! You're completely right! My bad.
- nbm 16y ago192.0.2.0/24 is actually intended for use in examples and documentation, just as it was used in this announcement. Per RFC5737 - http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5737.txt http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5737.txt: "The use of designated address ranges for documentation and examples reduces the likelihood of conflicts and confusion arising from the use of addresses assigned for some other purpose."
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- there 16y agoif anyone is wondering about the name, 53 is the port that dns operates over.
- snissn 16y agoAmazon should add a feature for geographic load balancing that could compliment their aws locations
- eli 16y agoI believe that was in the email announced under planned features for the future.
- plusbryan 16y agoWould love to see some reliability and speed metrics in the coming weeks as adoption increases!
- shykes 16y agoWe're very happy Zerigo DNS customers. Great API, great infrastructure, great support.
- pquerna 16y agoUs too, Zerigo has been awesome, and is already API driven :)
- JeffL 16y agoIs there any performance reason to use this as DNS as opposed to the DNS servers on register.com for just a regular web site?
- philfreo 16y agoDid anyone else see "Amazon 53" and think "Amazon S3"?
- mrinterweb 16y agoI'm excited about the API available for AWS 53, but I just love the old crusty looking Zone Edit. http://legacy.zoneedit.com http://legacy.zoneedit.com If you're dealing with low volume DNS for a couple domains, Zone Edit is hard to beat.
- nikcub 16y agoGreat, so now they can also switch off your DNS if they don't like what you are hosting.
- rmoriz 16y agoIf you like AWS or not: It's not a good idea to have everything in one account. It's a single point of failiure anway and you want to distribute your core infrastructure between different parties. It's cool to run a DNS by AWS but not cool if you don't have mirrors/secondary nameservers, too.
- tomstuart 16y agoHere's hoping that this is the first step towards making ELB actually usable -- i.e. dropping the requirement that you must point a CNAME at the ELB hostname, which prevents you from using a zone's root record (you can balance www.foo.com but not foo.com). To wit: In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name As demonstrated by https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=32044 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=32044, lots of people want this.
- rosejn 16y agoRouting traffic to wikileaks would have been a perfect demonstration of this new system. Instead they decided to show how much they respect freedom of speech. And tptacek, yes we should speak about wikileaks when discussing Amazon, from now on. This isn't a fanboy site, this is a place to discuss the real ramifications of a company's actions.
- jpcx01 16y agoI'm currently using Zerigo. They've been awesome so probably wont switch anytime soon. Tough competition going up against AMZN for this though.
- kmfrk 16y agoSay what you want about the whole Wikileaks affair, but regardless of where you stand, Amazon's sense of timing seems really bad. Couldn't they at least have waited a week after they declined to host Wikileaks? People will undoubtedly tie the two things together, and Wikileaks supporters will make a big effort to point out Amazon's recent misstep. I would probably have waited just a couple of days or weeks before this recent event was out of most people's minds.
- jgreen10 16y agoNo such thing as bad publicity. Seriously, I don't think Amazon will even notice the tiniest drop in sales, that's just not how it works.
- pierrefar 16y agoNot immediately, no. You can't really just stop using AWS and switch overnight. In the long term, this will factor in decisions whether to expand on AWS or for someone starting new, just like other factors like price, benfits, and lock-in.
- kahawe 16y agoI would say it perfectly displays what wikileaks was for them: just another regular client and they are not going to bend over just for one "small fish", no matter how beloved and important this one fish is amongst the tech savvy crowd.
- kmfrk 16y agoI think it's important to separate a rejection from a termination. Apparently, Wikileaks has been hosted on EC2 for over a month[1], which makes Amazon's decision a termination instead of a rejection. I could also understand if Amazon didn't notice Wikileaks for a few days, but weeks? Getting rejected poses no problem for anyone; there are grey areas, and everyone needs to draw a line. But getting pulled after being hosted for several weeks? What changed? Amazon pulling Wikileaks has created a Damoclean sword in the minds of people who consider to use AWS in the future.
- sramov 16y agoDJ Bernstein TinyDNS 1.05 Anycast djbdns, nice :)
- smountcastle 16y agoDid you use fpdns (http://code.google.com/p/fpdns/ http://code.google.com/p/fpdns/) to finger-print Amazon's service? If so, I've never heard good things about djbdns :( NSD (http://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/nsd/ http://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/nsd/) seems to be the new hotness as far as authoritative DNS servers go.
- sramov 16y agoNo, I've set up Route 53 on my own domain (ramov.com) and queried the results via DNSCog (http://www.dnscog.com/ http://www.dnscog.com/). I've used NSD once, it was good. Other than djb 'non standard' conventions and installation procedures, I see no other issues with his software and am happy Amazon opted for djbdns, especially since I don't have to manage it :)
- fanf2 16y agoThis announcement would have been worth something if they supported DNSSEC automatically for all the domains they host. Using unmaintained broken software prevents them from supporting advanced protocol features. For another example, the DNS already has a standard update API, but Amazon chose crippled software and reinvented the wheel instead of interoperating with the dynamic update code that is already out there.
- lhnz 16y agoThis is awful timing on their part, re: wikileaks, and talks of decentralised DNS safe from politics.
- oomkiller 16y agoWhat's the big deal here? Linode provides me all of the DNS I need.
- BenjieGillam 16y agoFinally! I've been wanting this for AGES!
- benologist 16y ago$0.50 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month $0.25 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month bleh.
- eli 16y agoWhere are you getting service now? I'm paying something like $2.00 per million at Dns Made Easy.
- benologist 16y agohttp://dnspark.net/ http://dnspark.net/ Not sure how many dns lookups get done a day but I see about 6 - 7 million people daily. 20m lookups per month for $14/year, and they don't actually track or bill the excess stuff, I've asked them about it before and it's not implemented with no ETA. Been with them for a long time and love them although their interface is ugly.
- smountcastle 16y agoAt these rates, it looks like the minimum cost per year per zone is $18 ($1.50/month, $1.00 for the zone and $.50 for the first million queries). This is extremely competitive for folks who only need to manage a very small number of zones. For those with many zones, one of the existing services from UltraDNS or VeriSign would be more appropriate.
- charlesju 16y agoIt seems to me that GoDaddy does this for free? I've also used Slicehost for free. Is there a difference between their free DNS offering and Amazon's paid version?
- chopsueyar 16y agoTTL minimums.
- nextparadigms 16y agoYeah, as if anyone wants to leave the DNS info in your hands too, Amazon, after pulling Wikileaks at a senator's call. Amazon should offer domain names next, so it's just one stop for politicians who want to completely eliminate a website from the web when they feel like it.
- mgkimsal 16y agoThere's no mention of IPv6 support. Given the situation that IPv4 addresses will be running out shortly, it'd be nice to see some acknowledgment of forward-thinking IPv6 plans. edit: sorry to be so out of step - I guess I should have tied wikileaks to ipv6 to fit in with the rest of the comments.
- francoisdevlin 16y agoThe FAQ says they support AAAA http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/ http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/
- mgkimsal 16y agoGreat - would have done good to put that somewhere on the main page (imo). Thanks.
- PonyGumbo 16y agoIt would be nice if they supported vanity nameservers.
- gfodor 16y agoA big reason this is important is that it's a stepping stone to location based DNS routing. That'd be the very last showstopper for some deployments being exclusively AWS.
- eli 16y ago"In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name, and the ability to route your customers to the closest EC2 region."
- elliottcarlson 16y agoOne thing I couldn't find is if it supports wildcard DNS (granted I only did a quick in page search both here and the service description page). Anyone have any insight?
- capstone 16y agoFrom Amazon: Amazon Route 53 supports wildcard entries for all record types. A wildcard entry is a record in a DNS zone that will match requests for any domain name based on the configuration you set. For example, a wildcard DNS record such as *.example.com will match queries for www.example.com and subdomain.example.com.
- javan 16y agoIt would be nice if they added this service to their management console; I'm lazy.