Routing Policies

Simple routing policy

• Use for a single resource that performs a given function for your domain, for example, a web server that serves content for the example.com website.

• Simple routing lets you configure standard DNS records, with no special Route 53 routing such as weighted or latency.

• If you choose the simple routing policy in the Route 53 console, you can't create multiple records that have the same name and type, but you can specify multiple values in the same record, such as multiple IP addresses.

• If you specify multiple values in a record, Route 53 returns all values to the recursive resolver in random order, and the resolver returns the values to the client (such as a web browser) that submitted the DNS query.

  • The client then chooses a value and resubmits the query.

• You cannot attach health checks to a simple routing policy.

Failover routing policy

• Failover routing lets you route traffic to a resource when the resource is healthy or to a different resource when the first resource is unhealthy.

Geolocation routing policy

• Geolocation routing lets you choose the resources that serve your traffic based on the geographic location of your users, meaning the location that DNS queries originate from.

• For example, you might want all queries from Europe to be routed to an ELB load balancer in the Frankfurt region.

• When you use geolocation routing, you can localize your content and present some or all of your website in the language of your users.

• You can also use geolocation routing to restrict distribution of content to only the locations in which you have distribution rights.

Geoproximity routing policy

• Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another.

• You can also optionally choose to route more traffic or less to a given resource by specifying a value, known as a bias.

  • A bias expands or shrinks the size of the geographic region from which traffic is routed to a resource.

Latency routing policy

• Use when you have resources in multiple AWS Regions and you want to route traffic to the region that provides the best latency.

Multivalue answer routing policy

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

• Multivalue answer routing lets you configure Amazon Route 53 to return multiple values, such as IP addresses for your web servers, in response to DNS queries.

• You can specify multiple values for almost any record, but multivalue answer routing also lets you check the health of each resource, so Route 53 returns only values for healthy resources.

• It's 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.

Weighted routing policy

• Use to route traffic to multiple resources in proportions that you specify.

• Weighted routing lets you associate multiple resources with a single domain name (example.com) or subdomain name (acme.example.com) and choose how much traffic is routed to each resource.

• This can be useful for a variety of purposes, including load balancing and testing new versions of software.