Route 53

AWS Route 53

How Route 53 Routes Traffic
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 21 Comments

AWS Route 53

  • Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
  • Route 53 provides three main functions:
    • Domain registration
      • allows domain names registration
    • Domain Name System (DNS) service
      • translates friendly domains names like www.example.com into IP addresses like 192.0.2.1
      • responds to DNS queries using a global network of authoritative DNS servers, which reduces latency
      • can route Internet traffic to CloudFront, Elastic Beanstalk, ELB, or S3. There’s no charge for DNS queries to these resources
    • Health Checking
      • can monitor the health of resources such as web and email servers.
      • sends automated requests over the Internet to the application to
        verify that it’s reachable, available, and functional
      • CloudWatch alarms can be configured for the health checks to send notifications when a resource becomes unavailable.
      • can be configured to route Internet traffic away from resources that are unavailable
    • Security
      • supports both DNSSEC for domain registration and DNSSEC signing

How Route 53 Routes Traffic

Supported DNS Resource Record Types

  • A (Address) Format
    • is an IPv4 address in dotted decimal notation for e.g. 192.0.2.1
  • AAAA Format
    • is an IPv6 address in colon-separated hexadecimal format
  • CNAME Format
    • is the same format as a domain name
    • DNS protocol does not allow creation of a CNAME record for the top node of a DNS namespace, also known as the zone apex for e.g. the DNS name example.com registration, the zone apex is example.com, a CNAME record for example.com cannot be created, but CNAME records can be created for www.example.com, newproduct.example.com etc.
    • If a CNAME record is created for a subdomain, any other resource record sets for that subdomain cannot be created for e.g. if a CNAME created for www.example.com, no other resource record sets for which the value of the Name field is www.example.com can be created
  • MX (Mail Xchange) Format
    • contains a decimal number that represents the priority of the MX record, and the domain name of an email server
  • NS (Name Server) Format
    • An NS record identifies the name servers for the hosted zone. The value for an NS record is the domain name of a name server.
  • PTR Format
    • A PTR record Value element is the same format as a domain name.
  • SOA (Start of Authority) Format
    • SOA record provides information about a domain and the corresponding Amazon Route 53 hosted zone
  • SPF (Sender Policy Framework) Format
    • SPF records were formerly used to verify the identity of the sender of email messages, however is not recommended
    • Instead of an SPF record, a TXT record that contains the applicable value is recommended
  • SRV Format
    • An SRV record Value element consists of four space-separated values.The first three values are decimal numbers representing priority, weight, and port. The fourth value is a domain name for e.g. 10 5 80 hostname.example.com
  • TXT (Text) Format
    • A TXT record contains a space-separated list of double-quoted strings. A single string include a maximum
      of 255 characters. In addition to the characters that are permitted unescaped in domain names, space
      is allowed in TXT strings

Alias Resource Record Sets

  • Route 53 supports alias resource record sets, which enables routing of queries to a CloudFront distribution, Elastic Beanstalk, ELB, an S3 bucket configured as a static website, or another Route 53 resource record set
  • Alias records are not standard for DNS RFC and are a Route 53 extension to DNS functionality
  • Alias record is similar to a CNAME record and is always of type A or AAAA
  • Alias record can be created both for the root domain or apex zone, such as example.com, and for subdomains, such as www.example.com. CNAME records can be used only for subdomains.
  • Route 53 automatically recognizes changes in the resource record sets that the alias resource record set refers to for e.g. for a site pointing to an load balancer, if the IP of the load balancer changes, it will reflect those changes automatically in the DNS answers without any changes to the hosted zone that contains resource record sets
  • Alias resource record set does not support TTL or Time to Time if it points to a CloudFront distribution, an ELB, or an S3 bucket. Underlying CloudFront, load balancer, or S3 TTLs are used.
  • Alias records are free to query and do not incur any charges.
  • Alias record supported targets
  • Alias records are not supported for
    • EC2 DNS
    • RDS endpoints.

Route 53 Alias vs CNAME

Refer to blog post @ Route 53 Alias vs CNAME

Route 53 CNAME vs Alias Records

Route 53 Hosted Zone

  • Hosted Zone is a container for records, which include information about how to route traffic for a domain (such as example.com) and all of its subdomains (such as www.example.com, retail.example.com, and seattle.accounting.example.com).
  • A hosted zone has the same name as the corresponding domain.
  • Routing Traffic to the Resources
    • Create a hosted zone with either a public hosted zone or a private hosted zone:
      • Public Hosted Zone – for routing internet traffic to the resources for a specific domain and its subdomains
      • Private hosted zone – for routing traffic within a VPC
    • Create records in the hosted zone
      • Records define where to route traffic for each domain name or subdomain name.
      • Name of each record in a hosted zone must end with the name of the hosted zone.
  • For public/private and private Hosted Zones that have overlapping
    namespaces, Route 53 Resolvers routes traffic to the most specific match.
  • IAM permissions apply only at the Hosted Zone level

Route 53 Health Checks

  • Route 53 health checks monitor the health and performance of the underlying resources.
  • Health check types
    • Health checks that monitor an endpoint, such as a web server.
      • Health checkers are located in locations around the world.
      • The health checker location and interval can be specified.
      • Health checker evaluates the health of the endpoint based
        • Response time
        • Specified failure threshold – Whether the endpoint responds to a number of consecutive health checks
      • The endpoint is considered healthy if more than 18% of health checkers report that an endpoint is healthy.
      • Health check is considered healthy if
        • HTTP and HTTPS health checks
          • TCP connection can be established within four seconds.
          • Returns 2xx or 3xx within two seconds after connecting.
        • TCP health checks
          • TCP connection can be established within ten seconds.
        • HTTP and HTTPS health checks with string matching
          • TCP connection can be established within four seconds.
          • Returns 2xx or 3xx within two seconds after connecting. 
          • Route 53 searches the response body for the specified string which must appear entirely in the first 5,120 bytes of the response body or the endpoint fails the health check.
    • Calculated health checks – Health checks that monitor the status of other health checks.
      • Health check that does the monitoring is the parent health check, and the health checks that are monitored are child health checks.
      • One parent health check can monitor the health of up to 255 child health checks
    • Health checks that monitor the status of a CloudWatch alarm.
      • Route 53 monitors the data stream for the corresponding alarm instead of monitoring the alarm state.
  • Route 53 checks the health of an endpoint by sending an HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP request to the specified IP address and port.
  • For a health check to succeed, the router and firewall rules must allow inbound traffic from the IP addresses that the health checkers use.

Route 53 Routing Policies

Refer Blog post @ Route 53 Routing Policies

Route 53 Resolver

Refer Blog post @ Route 53 Resolver

Route 53 Split-view (Split-horizon) DNS

  • Route 53 Split-view (Split-horizon) DNS helps access an internal version of the website using the same domain name that is used publicly.
  • Both a private and public hosted zone can be maintained with the same domain name for split-view DNS.
  • Ensure that DNS resolution and DNS hostnames are enabled on the source VPC.
  • DNS queries will respond with answers based on the source of the request.
  • From within the VPC, answers will come from the private hosted zone, while public queries will return answers from the public hosted zone.

Route 53 DNSSEC

  • DNSSEC – Domain Name System Security Extensions, a protocol for securing DNS traffic, helps protect a domain from DNS spoofing man-in-the-middle attacks.
  • DNSSEC works only for public hosted zones.
  • Route 53 supports DNSSEC signing as well as DNSSEC for domain registration.
  • With DNSSEC enabled for a domain, the DNS resolver establishes a chain of trust for responses from intermediate resolvers.
  • The chain of trust begins with the TLD registry for the domain (your domain’s parent zone) and ends with the authoritative name servers at your DNS service provider.
  • With DNSSEC enabled, Route 53 creates a key-signing key (KSK) using customer managed key in AWS KMS that supports DNSSEC. The customer-managed key must meet the following requirements
    • must be in the US East (N. Virginia) Region
    • must be an asymmetric customer managed key with an ECC_NIST_P256 key spec.

Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall

  • Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall provides protection for outbound DNS requests from the VPCs and can monitor and control the domains that the applications can query.
  • DNS Firewall can filter and regulate outbound DNS traffic for the VPC.
  • Reusable collections of filtering rules can be created in DNS Firewall rule groups and be associated with the VPC, with the activity monitored in DNS Firewall logs and metrics.
  • A primary use of DNS Firewall protections is to help prevent DNS exfiltration of the data. DNS exfiltration can happen when a bad actor compromises an application instance in the VPC and then uses DNS lookup to send data out of the VPC to a domain that they control.
  • DNS Firewall can be configured to
    • deny access to the domains that you know to be bad and allow all other queries to pass through OR
    • deny access to all domains except for the ones that you explicitly trust.
  • DNS Firewall is a feature of Route 53 Resolver and doesn’t require any additional Resolver setup to use.
  • Firewall Manager can be used to centrally configure and manage the DNS Firewall rule group associations for the VPCs across the accounts in an Organization. Firewall Manager automatically adds associations for VPCs that come into the scope of the Firewall Manager DNS Firewall policy

Route 53 Logging

  • DNS Query Logging
    • DNS Query logs contain information like
      • Domain or subdomain that was requested
      • Date and time of the request
      • DNS record type (such as A or AAAA)
      • Route 53 edge location that responded to the DNS query
      • DNS response code, such as NoError or ServFail
    • Route 53 will send DNS Query logs to CloudWatch Logs.
    • DNS Query Logging is only available for public hosted zones. Use Resolver Query logging for private hosted zones.
    • Query logs contain only the queries that DNS resolvers forward to Route 53 and do not include the entries cached by DNS resolvers.
  • Resolver Query Logging
    • Resolver Query logging logs the following queries
      • Queries that originate in specified VPCs, as well as the responses to those DNS queries.
      • Queries from on-premises resources that use an inbound Resolver endpoint.
      • Queries that use an outbound Resolver endpoint for recursive DNS resolution.
      • Queries that use Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall rules to block, allow, or monitor domain lists.
    • Resolver query logging logs only unique queries, not queries that Resolver is able to respond to from the cache.
    • Resolver query logs include values such as the following:
      • AWS Region where the VPC was created
      • The ID of the VPC that the query originated from
      • The IP address of the instance that the query originated from
      • The instance ID of the resource that the query originated from
      • The date and time that the query was first made
      • The DNS name requested (such as prod.example.com)
      • The DNS record type (such as A or AAAA)
      • The DNS response code, such as NoError or ServFail
      • The DNS response data, such as the IP address that is returned in response to the DNS query
      • A response to a DNS Firewall rule action
    • Route 53 will send Resolver Query logs to

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. What does Amazon Route53 provide?
    1. A global Content Delivery Network.
    2. None of these.
    3. A scalable Domain Name System
    4. An SSH endpoint for Amazon EC2.
  2. Does Amazon Route 53 support NS Records?
    1. Yes, it supports Name Service records.
    2. No
    3. It supports only MX records.
    4. Yes, it supports Name Server records. 
  3. Does Route 53 support MX Records?
    1. Yes
    2. It supports CNAME records, but not MX records.
    3. No
    4. Only Primary MX records. Secondary MX records are not supported.
  4. Which of the following statements are true about Amazon Route 53 resource records? Choose 2 answers
    1. An Alias record can map one DNS name to another Amazon Route 53 DNS name.
    2. A CNAME record can be created for your zone apex.
    3. An Amazon Route 53 CNAME record can point to any DNS record hosted anywhere.
    4. TTL can be set for an Alias record in Amazon Route 53.
    5. An Amazon Route 53 Alias record can point to any DNS record hosted anywhere.
  5. Which statements are true about Amazon Route 53? (Choose 2 answers)
    1. Amazon Route 53 is a region-level service
    2. You can register your domain name
    3. Amazon Route 53 can perform health checks and failovers to a backup site in the even of the primary site failure
    4. Amazon Route 53 only supports Latency-based routing
  6. A customer is hosting their company website on a cluster of web servers that are behind a public-facing load balancer. The customer also uses Amazon Route 53 to manage their public DNS. How should the customer configure the DNS zone apex record to point to the load balancer?
    1. Create an A record pointing to the IP address of the load balancer
    2. Create a CNAME record pointing to the load balancer DNS name.
    3. Create a CNAME record aliased to the load balancer DNS name.
    4. Create an A record aliased to the load balancer DNS name
  7. A user has configured ELB with three instances. The user wants to achieve High Availability as well as redundancy with ELB. Which of the below mentioned AWS services helps the user achieve this for ELB?
    1. Route 53
    2. AWS Mechanical Turk
    3. Auto Scaling
    4. AWS EMR
  8. How can the domain’s zone apex for example “myzoneapexdomain com” be pointed towards an Elastic Load Balancer?
    1. By using an AAAA record
    2. By using an A record
    3. By using an Amazon Route 53 CNAME record
    4. By using an Amazon Route 53 Alias record
  9. You need to create a simple, holistic check for your system’s general availability and uptime. Your system presents itself as an HTTP-speaking API. What is the simplest tool on AWS to achieve this with?
    1. Route53 Health Checks (Refer link)
    2. CloudWatch Health Checks
    3. AWS ELB Health Checks
    4. EC2 Health Checks
  10. Your organization’s corporate website must be available on www.acme.com and acme.com. How should you configure Amazon Route 53 to meet this requirement?
    1. Configure acme.com with an ALIAS record targeting the ELB. www.acme.com with an ALIAS record targeting the ELB.
    2. Configure acme.com with an A record targeting the ELB. www.acme.com with a CNAME record targeting the acme.com record.
    3. Configure acme.com with a CNAME record targeting the ELB. www.acme.com with a CNAME record targeting the acme.com record.
    4. Configure acme.com using a second ALIAS record with the ELB target. www.acme.com using a PTR record with the acme.com record target.

Further Reading

AWS Route 53 Routing Policy

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 7 Comments

AWS Route 53 Routing Policy

AWS Route 53 routing policy determines how AWS would respond to the DNS queries and provides multiple routing policy options.

Simple Routing Policy

  • Simple routing policy is a simple round-robin policy and can be applied when there is a single resource doing the function for the domain e.g. web server that serves content for the website.
  • Simple routing helps configure standard DNS records, with no special Route 53 routing such as weighted or latency.
  • Route 53 responds to the DNS queries based on the values in the resource record set e.g. IP address in an A record.
  • Simple routing does not allow the creation of multiple records with the same name and type, but multiple values can be specified in the same record, such as multiple IP addresses.
  • Route 53 displays all the values to resolve it recursively in random order and the resolver displays the values for the client. The client then chooses a value and resends the query.
  • Simple routing policy does not support health checks, so the record would be returned to the client even if it is unhealthy.
  • With Alias record enabled, only one AWS resource or one record can be specified in the current hosted zone.

Weighted Routing Policy

  • Weighted routing policy helps route traffic to different resources in specified proportions (weights) e.g., 75% to one server and 25% to the other during a pilot release
  • Weights can be assigned between any number from 0 to 255 inclusive.
  • Weighted routing policy can be applied when there are multiple resources that perform the same function e.g., webservers serving the same site
  • Weighted resource record sets allow associating multiple resources with a single DNS name.
  • Weighted routing policy use cases include
    • load balancing between regions
    • A/B testing and piloting new versions of software
  • To create a group of weighted resource record sets, two or more resource record sets can be created that has the same combination of DNS name and type, and each resource record set is assigned a unique identifier and a relative weight.
  • When processing a DNS query, Route 53 searches for a resource record set or a group of resource record sets that have the specified name and type.
  • Route 53 selects one from the group. The probability of any one resource record set being selected depends on its weight as a proportion of the total weight for all resource record sets in the group for e.g., suppose www.example.com has three resource record sets with weights of 1 (20%), 1 (20%), and 3 (60%)(sum = 5). On average, Route 53 selects each of the first two resource records sets one-fifth of the time and returns the third resource record set three-fifths of the time.
  • Weighted routing policy supports health checks.

Latency-based Routing (LBR) Policy

  • Latency-based Routing Policy helps respond to the DNS query based on which data center gives the user the lowest network latency.
  • Latency-based routing policy can be used when there are multiple resources performing the same function and Route 53 needs to be configured to respond to the DNS queries with the resources that provide the fastest response with the lowest latency.
  • A latency resource record set can be created for the EC2 resource in each region that hosts the application. When Route 53 receives a query for the corresponding domain, it selects the latency resource record set for the EC2 region that gives the user the lowest latency. Route 53 then responds with the value associated with that resource record set for e.g., you might have web servers for example.com in the EC2 data centers in Ireland and in Tokyo. When a user browses example.com from Singapore, Route 53 will pick up the data center (Tokyo) which has the lowest latency from the user’s location
  • Latency between hosts on the Internet can change over time as a result of changes in network connectivity and routing. Latency-based routing is based on latency measurements performed over a period of time, and the measurements reflect these changes for e.g. if the latency from the user in Singapore to Ireland improves, the user can be routed to Ireland
  • Latency-based routing cannot guarantee users from the same geographic will be served from the same location for any compliance reason
  • Latency resource record sets can be created using any record type that Route 53 supports except NS or SOA.
  • Latency-based routing policy supports health checks.

Failover Routing Policy

  • Failover routing policy allows active-passive failover configuration, in which one resource (primary) takes all traffic when it’s healthy and the other resource (secondary) takes all traffic when the first isn’t healthy.
  • Route 53 health checking agents will monitor each location/endpoint of the application to determine its availability.
  • Failover routing policy is applicable for Public hosted zones only.

Geolocation Routing Policy

  • Geolocation routing policy helps respond to DNS queries based on the geographic location of the users i.e. location from which the DNS queries originate.
  • Geolocation routing policy use cases include
    • localization of content and presenting some or all of the website in the user’s language
    • restrict distribution of content to only the locations in which you have distribution rights.
    • balancing load across endpoints in a predictable, easy-to-manage way, so that each user location is consistently routed to the same endpoint.
  • Geolocation routing policy allows geographic locations to be specified by continent, country, or by state (only in the US)
  • Geolocation record sets, if created, for overlapping geographic regions for e.g. continent, and then for the country within the same continent, priority goes to the smallest geographic region, which allows some queries for a continent to be routed to one resource and queries for selected countries on that continent to a different resource
  • Geolocation works by mapping IP addresses to locations, which might not be mapped to an exact geographic location.
  • A default resource record set can be created to handle these queries and also the ones which do not have an explicit record set created.
  • Route 53 returns a “no answer” response for queries from those locations if a default resource record set is not created.
  • Two geolocation resource record sets that specify the same geographic location cannot be created.
  • Route 53 supports the edns-client-subnet extension of EDNS0 (EDNS0 adds several optional extensions to the DNS protocol.) to improve the accuracy of geolocation routing.

Geoproximity Routing Policy

  • Geoproximity routing helps route traffic to the resources based on the geographic location of the users and the resources.
  • Geoproximity routing can be configured with a bias to optionally choose to route more traffic or less to a given resource. A bias expands or shrinks the size of the geographic region from which traffic is routed to a resource.
  • Route 53 Traffic flow can be used to create Geoproximity routing flows.
  • Route 53 supports both the AWS region where the resource is created and the latitude and longitude of the resource.

Multivalue Routing Policy

  • Multivalue routing helps return multiple values, e.g. IP addresses for the web servers, in response to DNS queries.
  • Multivalue routing also helps check the health of each resource, so only the values for healthy resources are returned.
  • Route 53 responds to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records and gives different answers to different DNS resolvers.
  • Multivalue answer routing is not a substitute for a load balancer, but the ability to return multiple health-checkable IP addresses is a way to use DNS to improve availability and load balancing.
  • To route traffic approximately randomly to multiple resources, such as web servers, one multivalue answer record can be created for each resource and, optionally, associate a Route 53 health check with each record. If a web server becomes unavailable after the resolver caches a response, client software can try another IP address in the response.

Route 53 Traffic Flow

  • Route 53 Traffic Flow helps easily manage traffic globally through a variety of routing types combined with DNS Failover in order to enable a variety of low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures.
  • Traffic Flow provides a simple visual editor, to easily manage how the end-users are routed to the application’s endpoints – whether in a single AWS region or distributed around the globe.
  • Traffic Flow routes traffic based on multiple criteria, such as endpoint health, geographic location, and latency.
  • Traffic Flow’s versioning feature maintains a history of changes to the traffic policies to allow easy rollback to the previous version.

Route 53 Complex Routing Policies

Route 53 Complex Routing Policies

  • Route 53 can be used to define more complex and nested routing policies
  • A combination of alias records (such as weighted alias and failover alias) and non-alias records can be used to build a decision tree that gives you greater control over how Route 53 responds to requests.
  • Resources would be created from the bottom of the tree

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. You have deployed a web application targeting a global audience across multiple AWS Regions under the domain name example.com. You decide to use Route 53 Latency-Based Routing to serve web requests to users from the region closest to the user. To provide business continuity in the event of server downtime you configure weighted record sets associated with two web servers in separate Availability Zones per region. During a DR test you notice that when you disable all web servers in one of the regions Route 53 does not automatically direct all users to the other region. What could be happening? (Choose 2 answers)
    1. Latency resource record sets cannot be used in combination with weighted resource record sets.
    2. You did not setup an http health check for one or more of the weighted resource record sets associated with the disabled web servers
    3. The value of the weight associated with the latency alias resource record set in the region with the disabled servers is higher than the weight for the other region.
    4. One of the two working web servers in the other region did not pass its HTTP health check
    5. You did not set “Evaluate Target Health” to “Yes” on the latency alias resource record set associated with example.com in the region where you disabled the servers.
  2. The compliance department within your multi-national organization requires that all data for your customers that reside in the European Union (EU) must not leave the EU and also data for customers that reside in the US must not leave the US without explicit authorization. What must you do to comply with this requirement for a web based profile management application running on EC2?
    1. Run EC2 instances in multiple AWS Availability Zones in single Region and leverage an Elastic Load Balancer with session stickiness to route traffic to the appropriate zone to create their profile (should be in 2 different regions – US and Europe)
    2. Run EC2 instances in multiple Regions and leverage Route 53’s Latency Based Routing capabilities to route traffic to the appropriate region to create their profile (Latency based routing policy would not guarantee the compliance requirement)
    3. Run EC2 instances in multiple Regions and leverage a third party data provider to determine if a user needs to be redirect to the appropriate region to create their profile
    4. Run EC2 instances in multiple AWS Availability Zones in a single Region and leverage a third party data provider to determine if a user needs to be redirect to the appropriate zone to create their profile(should be in 2 different regions – US and Europe)
  3. A US-based company is expanding their web presence into Europe. The company wants to extend their AWS infrastructure from Northern Virginia (us-east-1) into the Dublin (eu-west-1) region. Which of the following options would enable an equivalent experience for users on both continents?
    1. Use a public-facing load balancer per region to load-balance web traffic, and enable HTTP health checks.
    2. Use a public-facing load balancer per region to load-balance web traffic, and enable sticky sessions.
    3. Use Amazon Route 53, and apply a geolocation routing policy to distribute traffic across both regions
    4. Use Amazon Route 53, and apply a weighted routing policy to distribute traffic across both regions.
  4. You have been asked to propose a multi-region deployment of a web-facing application where a controlled portion of your traffic is being processed by an alternate region. Which configuration would achieve that goal?
    1. Route 53 record sets with weighted routing policy
    2. Route 53 record sets with latency based routing policy
    3. Auto Scaling with scheduled scaling actions set
    4. Elastic Load Balancing with health checks enabled
  5. Your company is moving towards tracking web page users with a small tracking image loaded on each page. Currently you are serving this image out of us-east, but are starting to get concerned about the time it takes to load the image for users on the west coast. What are the two best ways to speed up serving this image? Choose 2 answers
    1. Use Route 53’s Latency Based Routing and serve the image out of us-west-2 as well as us-east-1
    2. Serve the image out through CloudFront
    3. Serve the image out of S3 so that it isn’t being served of your web application tier
    4. Use EBS PIOPs to serve the image faster out of your EC2 instances
  6. Your API requires the ability to stay online during AWS regional failures. Your API does not store any state, it only aggregates data from other sources – you do not have a database. What is a simple but effective way to achieve this uptime goal?
    1. Use a CloudFront distribution to serve up your API. Even if the region your API is in goes down, the edge locations CloudFront uses will be fine.
    2. Use an ELB and a cross-zone ELB deployment to create redundancy across datacenters. Even if a region fails, the other AZ will stay online.
    3. Create a Route53 Weighted Round Robin record, and if one region goes down, have that region redirect to the other region.
    4. Create a Route53 Latency Based Routing Record with Failover and point it to two identical deployments of your stateless API in two different regions. Make sure both regions use Auto Scaling Groups behind ELBs. (Refer link)

References

AWS Route 53 Resolver – Hybrid DNS

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

AWS Route 53 Resolver – Hybrid DNS

  • Route 53 Resolver provides automatic DNS resolution within the VPC. It can help resolve DNS queries between VPCs and on-premises networks.
  • By default, Resolver answers DNS queries for VPC domain names such as domain names for EC2 instances or ELB load balancers.
  • Route 53 Resolver performs recursive lookups against public name servers for all other domain names.
  • However, on-premises instances cannot resolve Route 53 DNS entries and Route 53 cannot resolve on-premises DNS entries.
  • DNS resolution between VPC and on-premises network can be configured over a Direct Connect or VPN connection.
  • Route 53 Resolver is regional.
  • To use inbound or outbound forwarding, create a Resolver endpoint in the VPC.
  • As part of the definition of an endpoint, specify the IP addresses to forward inbound DNS queries to or the IP addresses that outbound queries originate from. For each IP address specified, Resolver automatically creates a VPC elastic network interface.

Inbound Endpoint – Forward DNS queries from resolvers on your network to AWS

  • DNS resolvers on the on-premises networks can forward DNS queries to Resolver in a specified VPC.
  • This enables DNS resolvers to easily resolve domain names for AWS resources such as EC2 instances or records in a Route 53 private hosted zone. 

Outbound Endpoint – Conditionally forward queries from a VPC to resolvers on your network

  • Route 53 Resolver can be configured to forward queries that it receives from EC2 instances in the VPCs to DNS resolvers on the on-premises networks.
  • To forward selected queries, Resolver rules can be created that specify the domain names for the DNS queries that you want to forward (such as example.com), and the IP addresses of the DNS resolvers on the on-premises network that you want to forward the queries to.
  • If a query matches multiple rules (example.com, acme.example.com), Resolver chooses the rule with the most specific match (acme.example.com) and forwards the query to the IP addresses that you specified in that rule. 

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. A company wants to install a new private intranet service using Amazon EC2 instances inside a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The VPC is connected to the company’s on-premises network using an AWS Site-to-Site VPN. The new service must communicate with the on-premises services already in place. On-premises services are accessed using company-owned hostnames. for instance, a DNS zone. This DNS zone is entirely on-premises and accessible only via the company’s private network. To connect the new service with current services, a solutions architect must guarantee that the new service can resolve hostnames on the company’s example domain. Which solution satisfies these criteria?
    1. Create an empty private zone in Route 53 for company.example . Add an additional NS record to the company’s on-premises company.example zone that points to the authoritative name servers for the new private zone in Route 53.
    2. Turn on DNS hostnames for the VPC. Configure a new outbound endpoint with Route 53 Resolver. Create a Resolver rule to forward requests for company.example to the on-premises name servers.
    3. Turn on DNS hostnames for the VPC. Configure a new inbound resolver endpoint with Route 53 Resolver. Configure the on-premises DNS server to forward requests for company.example to the new resolver.
    4. Use AWS Systems Manager to configure a run document that will install a hosts file that contains any required hostnames. Use an Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) rule to run the document when an instance is entering the running state.

References

AWS Route 53 Alias vs CNAME

CNAME vs Alias Records
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

AWS Route 53 Alias vs CNAME

  • Route 53 Alias records are similar to CNAME records, but there are some important differences.
  • Supported Resources
    • Alias records support selected AWS resources
      • Elastic Load Balancers
      • CloudFront distributions
      • API Gateway
      • Elastic Beanstalk
      • S3 Website
      • Global Accelerator
      • VPC Interface Endpoints
      • Route 53 record in the same hosted zone
    • Alias records do not support
      • EC2 DNS endpoint
      • RDS DNS endpoint
    • CNAME record can redirect DNS queries to any DNS record
  • Zone Apex or Root domain like example.com
    • Alias record supports mapping Zone Apex records
    • CNAME record does not support Zone Apex records
  • Charges
    • Route 53 doesn’t charge for alias queries to AWS resources
    • Route 53 charges for CNAME queries.
  • Record Type
    • Alias records only support A or AAAA record types
    • CNAME record redirects DNS queries for a record name regardless of the record type specified in the DNS query, such as A or AAAA.

Route 53 Alias vs CNAME Comparison

Route 53 CNAME vs Alias Records

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. Which of the following statements are true about Amazon Route 53 resource records? Choose 2 answers
    1. An Alias record can map one DNS name to another Amazon Route 53 DNS name.
    2. A CNAME record can be created for your zone apex.
    3. An Amazon Route 53 CNAME record can point to any DNS record hosted anywhere.
    4. TTL can be set for an Alias record in Amazon Route 53.
    5. An Amazon Route 53 Alias record can point to any DNS record hosted anywhere.
  2. How can the domain’s zone apex for example “myzoneapexdomain com” be pointed towards an Elastic Load Balancer?
    1. By using an AAAA record
    2. By using an A record
    3. By using an Amazon Route 53 CNAME record
    4. By using an Amazon Route 53 Alias record

References

AWS_Route_53_Alias_CNAME_Comparision

AWS Networking & Content Delivery Services Cheat Sheet

AWS Networking & Content Delivery Services
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 27 Comments

AWS Networking & Content Delivery Services Cheat Sheet

AWS Networking & Content Delivery Services

Virtual Private Cloud – VPC

  • helps define a logically isolated dedicated virtual network within the AWS
  • provides control of IP addressing using CIDR block from a minimum of /28 to a maximum of /16 block size
  • supports IPv4 and IPv6 addressing
  • cannot be extended once created
  • can be extended by associating secondary IPv4 CIDR blocks to VPC
  • Components
    • Internet gateway (IGW) provides access to the Internet
    • Virtual gateway (VGW) provides access to the on-premises data center through VPN and Direct Connect connections
    • VPC can have only one IGW and VGW
    • Route tables determine network traffic routing from the subnet
    • Ability to create a subnet with VPC CIDR block
    • A Network Address Translation (NAT) server provides outbound Internet access for EC2 instances in private subnets
    • Elastic IP addresses are static, persistent public IP addresses
    • Instances launched in the VPC will have a Private IP address and can have a Public or an Elastic IP address associated with it
    • Security Groups and NACLs help define security
    • Flow logs – Capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC
  • Tenancy option for instances
    • shared, by default, allows instances to be launched on shared tenancy
    • dedicated allows instances to be launched on a dedicated hardware
  • Route Tables
    • defines rules, termed as routes, which determine where network traffic from the subnet would be routed
    • Each VPC has a Main Route table and can have multiple custom route tables created
    • Every route table contains a local route that enables communication within a VPC which cannot be modified or deleted
    • Route priority is decided by matching the most specific route in the route table that matches the traffic
  • Subnets
    • map to AZs and do not span across AZs
    • have a CIDR range that is a portion of the whole VPC.
    • CIDR ranges cannot overlap between subnets within the VPC.
    • AWS reserves 5 IP addresses in each subnet – first 4 and last one
    • Each subnet is associated with a route table which define its behavior
      • Public subnets – inbound/outbound Internet connectivity via IGW
      • Private subnets – outbound Internet connectivity via an NAT or VGW
      • Protected subnets – no outbound connectivity and used for regulated workloads
  • Elastic Network Interface (ENI)
    • a default ENI, eth0, is attached to an instance which cannot be detached with one or more secondary detachable ENIs (eth1-ethn)
    • has primary private, one or more secondary private, public, Elastic IP address, security groups, MAC address and source/destination check flag attributes associated
    • AN ENI in one subnet can be attached to an instance in the same or another subnet, in the same AZ and the same VPC
    • Security group membership of an ENI can be changed
    • with pre-allocated Mac Address can be used for applications with special licensing requirements
  • Security Groups vs NACLs – Network Access Control Lists
    • Stateful vs Stateless
    • At instance level vs At subnet level
    • Only allows Allow rule vs Allows both Allow and Deny rules
    • Evaluated as a Whole vs Evaluated in defined Order
  • Elastic IP
    • is a static IP address designed for dynamic cloud computing.
    • is associated with an AWS account, and not a particular instance
    • can be remapped from one instance to another instance
    • is charged for non-usage, if not linked for any instance or instance associated is in a stopped state
  • NAT
    • allows internet access to instances in the private subnets.
    • performs the function of both address translation and port address translation (PAT)
    • needs source/destination check flag to be disabled as it is not the actual destination of the traffic for NAT Instance.
    • NAT gateway is an AWS managed NAT service that provides better availability, higher bandwidth, and requires less administrative effort
    • are not supported for IPv6 traffic
    • NAT Gateway supports private NAT with fixed private IPs.
  • Egress-Only Internet Gateways
    • outbound communication over IPv6 from instances in the VPC to the Internet, and prevents the Internet from initiating an IPv6 connection with your instances
    • supports IPv6 traffic only
  • Shared VPCs
    • allows multiple AWS accounts to create their application resources, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, Redshift clusters, and AWS Lambda functions, into shared, centrally-managed VPCs

VPC Peering

  • allows routing of traffic between the peer VPCs using private IP addresses with no IGW or VGW required.
  • No single point of failure and bandwidth bottlenecks
  • supports inter-region VPC peering
  • Limitations
    • IP space or CIDR blocks cannot overlap
    • cannot be transitive
    • supports a one-to-one relationship between two VPCs and has to be explicitly peered.
    • does not support edge-to-edge routing.
    • supports only one connection between any two VPCs
  • Private DNS values cannot be resolved
  • Security groups from peered VPC can now be referred to, however, the VPC should be in the same region.

VPC Endpoints

  • enables private connectivity from VPC to supported AWS services and VPC endpoint services powered by PrivateLink
  • does not require a public IP address, access over the Internet, NAT device, a VPN connection, or Direct Connect
  • traffic between VPC & AWS service does not leave the Amazon network
  • are virtual devices.
  • are horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC components that allow communication between instances in the VPC and services without imposing availability risks or bandwidth constraints on the network traffic.
  • Gateway Endpoints
    • is a gateway that is a target for a specified route in the route table, used for traffic destined to a supported AWS service.
    • only S3 and DynamoDB are currently supported
  • Interface Endpoints OR Private Links
    • is an elastic network interface with a private IP address that serves as an entry point for traffic destined to a supported service
    • supports services include AWS services, services hosted by other AWS customers and partners in their own VPCs (referred to as endpoint services), and supported AWS Marketplace partner services.
    • Private Links
      • provide fine-grained access control
      • provides a point-to-point integration.
      • supports overlapping CIDR blocks.
      • supports transitive routing

CloudFront

  • provides low latency and high data transfer speeds for the distribution of static, dynamic web, or streaming content to web users.
  • delivers the content through a worldwide network of data centers called Edge Locations or Point of Presence (PoPs)
  • keeps persistent connections with the origin servers so that the files can be fetched from the origin servers as quickly as possible.
  • dramatically reduces the number of network hops that users’ requests must pass through
  • supports multiple origin server options, like AWS hosted service for e.g. S3, EC2, ELB, or an on-premise server, which stores the original, definitive version of the objects
  • single distribution can have multiple origins and Path pattern in a cache behavior determines which requests are routed to the origin
  • Web distribution supports static, dynamic web content, on-demand using progressive download & HLS, and live streaming video content
  • supports HTTPS using either
    • dedicated IP address, which is expensive as a dedicated IP address is assigned to each CloudFront edge location
    • Server Name Indication (SNI), which is free but supported by modern browsers only with the domain name available in the request header
  • For E2E HTTPS connection,
    • Viewers -> CloudFront needs either a certificate issued by CA or ACM
    • CloudFront -> Origin needs a certificate issued by ACM for ELB and by CA for other origins
  •  Security
    • Origin Access Identity (OAI) can be used to restrict the content from S3 origin to be accessible from CloudFront only
    • supports Geo restriction (Geo-Blocking) to whitelist or blacklist countries that can access the content
    • Signed URLs 
      • to restrict access to individual files, for e.g., an installation download for your application.
      • users using a client, for e.g. a custom HTTP client, that doesn’t support cookies
    • Signed Cookies
      • provide access to multiple restricted files, for e.g., video part files in HLS format or all of the files in the subscribers’ area of a website.
      • don’t want to change the current URLs
    • integrates with AWS WAF, a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from attacks by allowing rules configured based on IP addresses, HTTP headers, and custom URI strings
  • supports GET, HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE to get object & object headers, add, update, and delete objects
    • only caches responses to GET and HEAD requests and, optionally, OPTIONS requests
    • does not cache responses to PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE request methods and these requests are proxied back to the origin
  • object removal from the cache
    • would be removed upon expiry (TTL) from the cache, by default 24 hrs
    • can be invalidated explicitly, but has a cost associated, however, might continue to see the old version until it expires from those caches
    • objects can be invalidated only for Web distribution
    • use versioning or change object name, to serve a different version
  • supports adding or modifying custom headers before the request is sent to origin which can be used to
    • validate if a user is accessing the content from CDN
    • identifying CDN from which the request was forwarded, in case of multiple CloudFront distributions
    • for viewers not supporting CORS to return the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header for every request
  • supports Partial GET requests using range header to download objects in smaller units improving the efficiency of partial downloads and recovery from partially failed transfers
  • supports compression to compress and serve compressed files when viewer requests include Accept-Encoding: gzip in the request header
  • supports different price classes to include all regions, or only the least expensive regions and other regions without the most expensive regions
  • supports access logs which contain detailed information about every user request for both web and RTMP distribution

AWS VPN

  • AWS Site-to-Site VPN provides secure IPSec connections from on-premise computers or services to AWS over the Internet
  • is cheap, and quick to set up however it depends on the Internet speed
  • delivers high availability by using two tunnels across multiple Availability Zones within the AWS global network
  • VPN requires a Virtual Gateway – VGW and Customer Gateway – CGW for communication
  • VPN connection is terminated on VGW on AWS
  • Only one VGW can be attached to a VPC at a time
  • VGW supports both static and dynamic routing using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)
  • VGW supports AWS-256 and SHA-2 for data encryption and integrity
  • AWS Client VPN is a managed client-based VPN service that enables secure access to AWS resources and resources in the on-premises network.
  • AWS VPN does not allow accessing the Internet through IGW or NAT Gateway, peered VPC resources, or VPC Gateway Endpoints from on-premises.
  • AWS VPN allows access accessing the Internet through NAT Instance and VPC Interface Endpoints from on-premises.

Direct Connect

  • is a network service that uses a private dedicated network connection to connect to AWS services.
  • helps reduce costs (long term), increases bandwidth, and provides a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections. 
  • supports Dedicated and Hosted connections
    • Dedicated connection is made through a 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, or 100 Gbps Ethernet port dedicated to a single customer.
    • Hosted connections are sourced from an AWS Direct Connect Partner that has a network link between themselves and AWS. 
  • provides Virtual Interfaces
    • Private VIF to access instances within a VPC via VGW
    • Public VIF to access non VPC services
  • requires time to setup probably months, and should not be considered as an option if the turnaround time is less
  • does not provide redundancy, use either second direct connection or IPSec VPN connection
  • Virtual Private Gateway is on the AWS side and Customer Gateway is on the Customer side
  • route propagation is enabled on VGW and not on CGW
  • A link aggregation group (LAG) is a logical interface that uses the link aggregation control protocol (LACP) to aggregate multiple dedicated connections at a single AWS Direct Connect endpoint and treat them as a single, managed connection
  • Direct Connect vs VPN IPSec
    • Expensive to Setup and Takes time vs Cheap & Immediate
    • Dedicated private connections vs Internet
    • Reduced data transfer rate vs Internet data transfer cost
    • Consistent performance vs Internet inherent variability
    • Do not provide Redundancy vs Provides Redundancy

Route 53

  • provides highly available and scalable DNS, Domain Registration Service, and health-checking web services
  • Reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications
  • Supports multi-region and backup architectures for High availability. ELB is limited to region and does not support multi-region HA architecture.
  • supports private Intranet facing DNS service
  • internal resource record sets only work for requests originating from within the VPC and currently cannot extend to on-premise
  • Global propagation of any changes made to the DN records within ~ 1min
  • supports Alias resource record set is a Route 53 extension to DNS.
    • It’s similar to a CNAME resource record set, but supports both for root domain – zone apex e.g. example.com, and for subdomains for e.g. www.example.com.
    • supports ELB load balancers, CloudFront distributions, Elastic Beanstalk environments, API Gateways, VPC interface endpoints, and  S3 buckets that are configured as websites.
  • CNAME resource record sets can be created only for subdomains and cannot be mapped to the zone apex record
  • supports Private DNS to provide an authoritative DNS within the VPCs without exposing the DNS records (including the name of the resource and its IP address(es) to the Internet.
  • Split-view (Split-horizon) DNS enables mapping the same domain publicly and privately. Requests are routed as per the origin.
  • Routing policy
    • Simple routing – simple round-robin policy
    • Weighted routing – assign weights to resource records sets to specify the proportion for e.g. 80%:20%
    • Latency based routing – helps improve global applications as requests are sent to the server from the location with minimal latency, is based on the latency and cannot guarantee users from the same geography will be served from the same location for any compliance reasons
    • Geolocation routing – Specify geographic locations by continent, country, the state limited to the US, is based on IP accuracy
    • Geoproximity routing policy – Use to route traffic based on the location of the resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another.
    • Multivalue answer routing policy – Use to respond to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records selected at random.
    • Failover routing – failover to a backup site if the primary site fails and becomes unreachable
  • Weighted, Latency and Geolocation can be used for Active-Active while Failover routing can be used for Active-Passive multi-region architecture
  • Traffic Flow is an easy-to-use and cost-effective global traffic management service. Traffic Flow supports versioning and helps create policies that route traffic based on the constraints they care most about, including latency, endpoint health, load, geoproximity, and geography.
  • Route 53 Resolver is a regional DNS service that helps with hybrid DNS
    • Inbound Endpoints are used to resolve DNS queries from an on-premises network to AWS
    • Outbound Endpoints are used to resolve DNS queries from AWS to an on-premises network

AWS Global Accelerator

  • is a networking service that helps you improve the availability and performance of the applications to global users.
  • utilizes the Amazon global backbone network, improving the performance of the applications by lowering first-byte latency, and jitter, and increasing throughput as compared to the public internet. 
  • provides two static IP addresses serviced by independent network zones that provide a fixed entry point to the applications and eliminate the complexity of managing specific IP addresses for different AWS Regions and AZs.
  • always routes user traffic to the optimal endpoint based on performance, reacting instantly to changes in application health, the user’s location, and configured policies
  • improves performance for a wide range of applications over TCP or UDP by proxying packets at the edge to applications running in one or more AWS Regions.
  • is a good fit for non-HTTP use cases, such as gaming (UDP), IoT (MQTT), or Voice over IP, as well as for HTTP use cases that specifically require static IP addresses or deterministic, fast regional failover. 
  • integrates with AWS Shield for DDoS protection

Transit Gateway – TGW

  • is a highly available and scalable service to consolidate the AWS VPC routing configuration for a region with a hub-and-spoke architecture.
  • acts as a Regional virtual router and is a network transit hub that can be used to interconnect VPCs and on-premises networks.
  • traffic always stays on the global AWS backbone, data is automatically encrypted, and never traverses the public internet, thereby reducing threat vectors, such as common exploits and DDoS attacks.
  • is a Regional resource and can connect VPCs within the same AWS Region.
  • TGWs across the same or different regions can peer with each other.
  • provides simpler VPC-to-VPC communication management over VPC Peering with a large number of VPCs.
  • scales elastically based on the volume of network traffic.