What is Route 53?
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable authoritative cloud Domain Name System (DNS) service. It connects the Internet traffic to appropriate servers hosting the requested Web application. In addition, route 53 also facilitates health-checking and domain name registration of services. The design of route 53 aims at providing a highly reliable and cost-effective approach for routing end-users to Internet applications. Why the name Route 53! AWS Route 53 takes its name from the Port 53, which handles DNS for both the TCP and UDP traffic requests

How domain registration works

If you want to create a website or a web application, you start by registering the name of your website, known as a domain name. Your domain name is the name, such as example.com, that your users enter in a browser to display your website.

Here's an overview of how you register a domain name with Amazon Route 53:

1. You choose a domain name and confirm that it's available, meaning that no one else has registered the domain name that you want.

   If the domain name you want is already in use, you can try other names or try changing only the top-level domain, such as .com, to another top-level domain, such as .ninja or .hockey. For a list of the top-level domains that Route 53 supports, see Domains that you can register with Amazon Route 53.

2. You register the domain name with Route 53. When you register a domain, you provide names and contact information for the domain owner and other contacts.

   When you register a domain with Route 53, the service automatically makes itself the DNS service for the domain by doing the following:

   • Creates a hosted zone that has the same name as your domain.

   • Assigns a set of four name servers to the hosted zone. When someone uses a browser to access your website, such as www.example.com, these name servers tell the browser where to find your resources, such as a web server or an Amazon S3 bucket. (Amazon S3 is object storage for storing and retrieving any amount of data from anywhere on the web. A bucket is a container for objects that you store in S3.)

   • Gets the name servers from the hosted zone and adds them to the domain.

For more information, see How internet traffic is routed to your website or web application.

1. At the end of the registration process, we send your information to the registrar for the domain. The domain registrar is either Amazon Registrar, Inc. or our registrar associate, Gandi. To find out who the registrar is for your domain, see Finding your registrar.

2. The registrar sends your information to the registry for the domain. A registry is a company that sells domain registrations for one or more top-level domains, such as .com.

3. The registry stores the information about your domain in their own database and also stores some of the information in the public WHOIS database.

   To register a new domain using Route 53

   1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Route 53 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/route53/.

   2. In the navigation pane, choose Domains and then Registered domains.

   3. On the Registered domains page, choose Register domains.

      1. In the Search for domain section, enter the domain name that you want to register, and choose Search to find out whether the domain name is available.

         If the domain name that you want to register contains characters other than a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and - (hyphen), note the following:

         • You can enter the name using the applicable characters. You don't need to convert the name to Punycode.

         • A list of languages appears. Choose the language of the specified name. For example, if you enter příklad ("example" in Czech), choose Czech (CES) or Czech (CZE).

• For information about how to specify characters other than a-z, 0-9, and - (hyphen) and how to specify internationalized domain names, see DNS domain name format.

If the domain you entered is available, it will be displayed, if not, similar domains will be displayed as suggestions.

You can choose up to five domains to register. The domains you select appear in the Selected domains list.

b.To register more domains, repeat steps 3a through 3b.

4.Choose Proceed to checkout.

5.On the Pricing page, choose the number of years that you want to register the domain for and whether you want us to automatically renew your domain registration before the expiration date.Choose Next.

1. On the Contact information page, enter contact information for the domain registrant, admin, and tech contacts. The values that you enter here are applied to all of the domains that you're registering. For more information, see Values that you specify when you register or transfer a domain.

   Note the following considerations:

   First Name and Last Name

   For First Name and Last Name, we recommend that you specify the name on your official ID. For some changes to domain settings, some domain registries require that you provide proof of identity. The name on your ID must match the name of the registrant contact for the domain.

   Different contacts

   By default, we use the same information for all three contacts. If you want to enter different information for one or more contacts, change the value of Same as registrant contact toggle switch to off position.

2. Choose Next.

3. On the Review page, review the information that you entered, and optionally correct it, read the terms of service, and select the check box to confirm that you've read the terms of service.

   Choose Submit.

4. AISPL (India) customers only: If your contact address is in India, your user agreement is with Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd (AISPL), a local AWS seller in India. To register a domain with Route 53, perform the following steps to pay the fee for registering your domain.

   a.Go to the Orders and Invoices page in the AWS Management Console.

   b.In the Payments Due section, find the applicable invoice.

   c.In the Actions column, choose Verify and Pay.

   After you pay the invoice, we complete the domain registration and send the applicable emails.

   1. For more information, see Managing your payments in India in the AWS Billing User Guide.

      9.In the navigation pane, choose Domains and then Requests.

      On this page you can view the status of domain and also if you need to respond to registrant contact verification email. You can also choose to resend the verification email.

      If you specified an email address for the registrant contact that has never been used to register a domain with Route 53, some TLD registries require you to verify that the address is valid.

      We send a verification email from one of the following email addresses:

• noreply@registrar.amazon.com – for TLDs registered by Amazon Registrar.

• noreply@domainnameverification.net – for TLDs registered by our registrar associate, Gandi. To determine who the registrar is for your TLD, see Finding your registrar.

  a.When you receive the verification email, choose the link in the email that verifies that the email address is valid. If you don't receive the email immediately, check your junk email folder.

  b.Return to the Requests page. If the status doesn't automatically update to say email-address is verified, refresh the browser.

• 10.When domain registration is complete, your next step depends on whether you want to use Route 53 or another DNS service as the DNS service for the domain:

Domain Name System (DNS) concepts

alias record

A type of record that you can create with Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to AWS resources such as Amazon CloudFront distributions and Amazon S3 buckets.

CIDR block

A CIDR block is an IP range used with IP-based routing. In Route 53 You can specify CIDR block from /0 to /24 for IPv4 and/0 to /48 for IPv6. For example, a /24 IPv4 CIDR block includes 256 contiguous IP addresses. You can group sets of CIDR blocks (or IP ranges) into CIDR locations, which are in turn grouped into reusable CIDR collections.

IP address

A number that is assigned to a device on the internet—such as a laptop, a smart phone, or a web server—that allows the device to communicate with other devices on the internet. IP addresses are in one of the following formats:

• Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) format, such as 192.0.2.44

• Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) format, such as 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:abcd:0001:2345

Route 53 supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for the following purposes:

• You can create records that have a type of A, for IPv4 addresses, or a type of AAAA, for IPv6 addresses.

• You can create health checks that send requests either to IPv4 or to IPv6 addresses.

• If a DNS resolver is on an IPv6 network, it can use either IPv4 or IPv6 to submit requests to Route 53.

Root server : Root servers are DNS nameservers that operate in the root zone. These servers can directly answer queries for records stored or cached within the root zone, and they can also refer other requests to the appropriate Top Level Domain (TLD) server.

Top Level Domain : The TLD servers are the DNS server group one step below root servers in the DNS hierarchy, and they are an integral part of resolving DNS queries. Ex : .com, .net, .in and .org.Domain Registrars : A authority that can assign domain names. Some popular ones are Domain.com, Bluehost, Network Solutions, HostGator, GoDaddy and Amazon Route 53 itself.

Hosted Zone :A hosted zone is a container for records, and records contain information about how you want to route traffic for a specific domain, such as example.com, and its subdomains (web.example.com, admin.example.com). A hosted zone and the corresponding domain have the same name.

Canonical Name (CName) : A CNAME, or Canonical Name record, is a record that points to another domain address rather than an IP address.

Alias Record : You will use an ALIAS record when you want the domain itself (not a subdomain) to “point” to a hostname. The ALIAS record is similar to a CNAME record, which is used to point subdomains to a hostname. The CNAME record only can be used for subdomains, so the ALIAS record fills this gap.

How the AWS Route 53 service works?

1. The domain name is first registered with AWS Route 53 or any Domain registrar, which is then configured to route Internet traffic to the servers hosting the domain name.
2. End-users enter the domain name or the complete URL into the browser search bar.
3. The ISP routes the request to a DNS resolver, a tool that converts the domain name into its IP address.
4. The DNS resolver then forwards the user request to a DNS root name server, which is then directed to its Top Level Domain (TLD) server and ultimately, to AWS Route 53.
5. The Route 53 authoritative name server returns the IP address of the domain name to the DNS resolver.
6. Now that the DNS resolver has the required IP address, it can forward the user request to the appropriate server hosting the content as per the configurations of the AWS Route 53 service.

Route 53 functions :

Dns resolver : A DNS resolver, also called a recursive resolver, is a server designed to receive DNS queries from web browsers and other applications. The resolver receives a hostname-for example, www.amazon.com — and is responsible for tracking down the IP address for that hostname. AWS Route 53 supports both IPv4 and IPv6 formats.

Domain registration : The facility of domain registration services is the core of Amazon route 53. Users could search for available domain names and register a domain name according to their choice. Furthermore, users also have the option of transferring in existing domain names for management by route 53.

S3 and CloudFront Zone Apex Support : If you use Amazon CloudFront and S3 for delivering website content, then visitors to your website could access the site at the zone apex. The zone apex is the root domain. For instance, visitors could access the website as xyz.com rather than www.xyz.com. It also Create Custom SSL certificates without requirements for proprietary code or complicated configurations.