Will route53 choose the closest region to serve the request? - amazon-web-services

I am planning to deploy my api gateway to multiple regions in AWS. I implement a health endpoint in the gateway in each region and configure them in route53 healthy check. So route53 will forward the request to the healthy regions if one region fails on healthy check.
My question is in case of all regions are healthy, will route53 route traffic to the closest region? For example, if there are 2 regions configured in route53, ap-southeast-1 and ap-southeast-2, can route53 route the traffic to ap-southeast-2 if the request is from Sydney since it is closer? If yes, how does route53 decide which one is closer?

Yes, you can do that using Route 53 Geolocation routing policy, which can be used when you want to serve your site based on the location of the client or user.

There are three routing policies in R53 that you may consider:
Geolocation routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your users.
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.
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.
how does route53 decide which one is closer?
Geolocation is based the location that DNS queries originate from.
Geoproximity routing lets Amazon Route 53 route traffic to your resources based on the geographic location of your users and your resources.
Latency-based routing is based on latency measurements performed over a period of time.
For all these, AWS can also use EDNS0 edns-client-subnet extension.

Related

Improving latency times for EC2 from different geographic areas

We have an EC2 instance in US East, and our latency for users in the UK + AU is about 1-2 seconds higher. We are only dealing with text data and an RDS server in the same zone. Provided we want to go the route of creating another image instance of the primary EC2. How does the process work in lowering latency? Per our understanding:
Create a replica from the image in AU/UK zones
Add the external IP's of these two servers to the domain nameserver which will automatically generally help route the user to the closest server?
Or does it involve creating some sort of load balancer with a geographic rule, and the load balancer IP is what our NS will be?
TLDR: How do we route UK users to the UK EC2 server, what does the setup look like?
I recommend that you use Latency-based routing - Amazon Route 53:
If your application is hosted in multiple AWS Regions, you can improve performance for your users by serving their requests from the AWS Region that provides the lowest latency.
You would configure one DNS Name to route to multiple IP addresses. Route 53 will examine the location of the incoming request and route the traffic to the destination with the lowest latency.
This is not quite the same as geographic routing because some countries have better Internet connectivity and traffic will be routed according to latency rather than distance.
Alternatively, you can use AWS Global Accelerator, which routes traffic across the AWS global network. It uses a single IP address that exists in multiple locations (known as anycast) to redirect traffic to the closest (fewest-hop) endpoint of the AWS global network, then sends traffic over that network to the closest AWS location where you have provisioned services. This can achieve lower latency than routing across the Internet, but incurs a per GB cost for traffic.

Is there any other way to connect VPC endpoints cross-region without using ELBs?

we are planning to create vpcendpoint in us-west-2 for nlb in us-east-1, for that currently we created nlb in us-west-2, created target groups pointing to to us-east-1 nlb interface ips and create VPC endpoint to the nlb in us-west-2. This setup works fine.
However, looking for better alternatives.
The nlb in east targets alb in the same region.
However, looking for better alternatives.
Using Route 53 resolvers to route cross-region traffic may be a better, simpler alternative to using ELBs.
From AWS guide:
The challenge some customers have faced is that VPC endpoints can only be used to access resources in the same Region as the endpoint
One of the ways we can solve this problem is with Amazon Route 53 Resolver. Route 53 Resolver provides inbound and outbound DNS services in a VPC. It allows you to resolve domain names for AWS resources in the Region where the resolver endpoint is deployed. It also allows you to forward DNS requests to other DNS servers based on rules you define. To consistently apply VPC endpoint policies to all traffic, we use Route 53 Resolver to steer traffic to VPC endpoints in each Region.
In-built to AWS PrivateLink, cross-region requests are still not supported (read this for S3 and this for DynamoDB) so there's no configuration possible on that front.

How can I use cloudwatch metric for `Latency-based` routing policy in route53?

I am deploying applications in AWS multiple regions. There are a few lambdas sitting behind API gateway. And I'd like to use route53 routing policy to route traffic to different regions.
The policy I'd like to use is Latency-based policy which means route53 routes traffic to resources based on its response time. I have read this doc https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-policy.html and https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/resource-record-sets-values-latency.html.
It works a little different than my thought. What I am looking for is the use the latency based on the response time in my API gateway or ALB. But based on the doc, it seems that latency is based on DNS resolve name server. Is there a way for me to use the latency based on cloudwatch metric like IntegrationLatency?

Is it possible to map different domain names to one IP address in AWS?

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this. If it's not, kindly refer me to the most appropriate place.
I need to have customized domain names for my clients but only one instance of the web app. Is this possible? How do you I go about this?
The answer may simply be yes. But it's not up to AWS, but rather the DNS for the domains you plan to use. All the application running on the AWS IP address has to do is not reject the domain names given to the web server stack in its configuration.
You can create as many domain names as you like to point to a single IP address using AWS route 53 hosted zones. You can create multiple A record in route 53 or you can utilise alias records.
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name
System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and
businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end
users to Internet applications by translating names like
www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that
computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully
compliant with IPv6 as well.
Amazon Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure
running in AWS – such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing
load balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets – and can also be used to route
users to infrastructure outside of AWS. You can use Amazon Route 53 to
configure DNS health checks to route traffic to healthy endpoints or
to independently monitor the health of your application and its
endpoints. Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow makes it easy for you to
manage traffic globally through a variety of routing types, including
Latency Based Routing, Geo DNS, Geoproximity, and Weighted Round
Robin—all of which can be combined with DNS Failover in order to
enable a variety of low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures. Using
Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow’s simple visual editor, you can easily
manage how your end-users are routed to your application’s
endpoints—whether in a single AWS region or distributed around the
globe. Amazon Route 53 also offers Domain Name Registration – you can
purchase and manage domain names such as example.com and Amazon Route
53 will automatically configure DNS settings for your domains.

Use AWS Route53 for Disaster Recovery - Route53 failed to redirect users

I deployed a web application in AWS. This is how I setup the environment....
I have Route53 Latency-Based Routing to serve web requests to users from the region closest to the user.
To provide disaster recovery, I have weighted record sets associated with two web servers in separate AZs per region.
Last night I disabled all web servers in one of the regions to test Disaster Recovery. Route 53 does not automatically direct all users to the other region. What's not right? I think its the configuration. What should I check?
Did you setup health checks and failover. Route 53 will failover only if you set it up - http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-failover.html