Why it matters

Route 53 is AWS DNS. Understanding shapes DNS-based traffic routing.

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The architecture

Hosted zone: DNS namespace for domain.

Records: A, AAAA, CNAME, ALIAS (AWS-specific).

Route 53 featuresHosted zonedomain recordsRouting policiesgeo / latency / weightedHealth checksroute around failuresALIAS records: like CNAME but at zone apex; free to query for AWS resources
DNS features.
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How it works end to end

Routing policies: simple, weighted (A/B), latency-based, failover, geo, multivalue.

Health checks: HTTP/HTTPS/TCP endpoints. Route around failures.

ALIAS: no charge for AWS resource DNS.

Private zones: internal-only DNS.