Route 53

  • A record:

    • A record value is always an IP address

    • A record maps your website like example.com to IP address (ex: Elastic IP)

  • CNAME:

    • CNAME can never be an IP address.

    • CNAME record maps a name to another name

    • CNAME are for actual DNS servers, you can't create a CNAME record for example.com

    • Ex:

      • An A record for example.com points to the server IP address

      • A CNAME record for www.example.com points to example.com

  • Alias:

    • Alias record is an Amazon Route 53-specific virtual record.

    • It works only with Amazon Route 53 (AWS specific resources)

    • AWS specific resources

      • ELB

      • CloudFront Distribution,

      • Elastic Beanstalks

      • S3 static websites

      • from one record in a hosted zone to another record.

  • A CNAME can’t be used for naked/root domain names. Root domain names must be mapped with either an A record or an Alias record (in Route 53).

  • AAAA Record:

    • AAAA record is similar to an A record but it is for IPv6 addresses

  • MX Record:

    • MX records (Mail Exchange records) is used for setting up Email servers

    • MX records must be mapped correctly to deliver email to your address

  • Simple routing policy

    • Route traffic to single resource

  • Failover routing policy

    • active-passive failover

  • Latency routing policy

    • You have resources in multiple AWS Regions and you want to route traffic to the Region that provides the best latency with less round-trip time

  • Geolocation routing policy

    • route traffic based on the location of your users

  • Geoproximity routing policy

    • route traffic based on the location of your resource

    • shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another

  • Multivalue answer routing policy

    • you want Route 53 to respond to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records selected at random

    • return multiple values for a DNS query and route traffic to multiple IP addresses

    • Associating a Route 53 health check with records

  • Weighted routing policy

    • route traffic to multiple resources in proportions (based on weight 30% , 60% etc) that you specify.

https://www.whizlabs.com/blog/dns-records/