On September 26, I had the privilege of speaking at the Boston Azure User Group in Boston, MA. The topic covered a in-depth discussion of DNS Routing in Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager and Amazon Route53. It was an very interactive session with lots of great questions from the attendees. The topics that we covered

1. Routing in the Cloud
Azure Traffic Manager and Amazon Route 53
Udaiappa Ramachandran ( Udai )
@nhcloud

2. Who am I?
• Udaiappa Ramachandran ( Udai )
• Chief Architect, Ektron, Inc.,
• Azure Insider
• New Hampshire Cloud User Group (http://www.nashuaug.org )
• Focus on Cloud Computing
• Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services
• http://cloudycode.wordpress.com
• @nhcloud

3. Agenda
• DNS
• Routing Types
• Azure Traffic Manager
• Amazon Route 53
• References
• Q & A

4. Why need Routing?
• High Availability
• Low latency
• High Performance

5. Domain Naming System
• What is DNS?
• DNS Record Types
• A or AAAA
• NS
• CNAME
• MX
• SOA

6. Routing Types
• Simple
• Round Robin
• Weighted
• Performance or Latency
• Failover

8. •
•

9. www-contoso.trafficmgr.com
www.contoso.com
www.contoso.com
A: 11.22.33.44

12. 

15. Traffic Manager
Demo

16. © 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
What is Route 53?
Route 53 is AWS’s authoritative Domain Name
(DNS) service
DNS translates domain names (like
www.amazon.com) into IP addresses – think of
it as a “phone book” for the internet
DNS is a Tier-0 service – availability is most
important
We chose the name “Route 53″ as a play on the
fact that DNS servers respond to queries on
port 53

17. © 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
How it Works
Users DNS Resolver Route 53
Where is
www.example.com?
I don’t know – I’ll ask
the authority
1.2.3.4 1.2.3.4
53

18. © 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Design Principles
Reliable
Fast
Integrated
with AWS
Easy to Use
Cost
Effective
Flexible
• Redundant locations
• Backed with SLA
• Worldwide anycast network
• Fast propagation of changes
• ELB-Alias Queries
• Latency/Performance Based
Routing
• Weighted
• Failover
• Console
• Programmatic API
• Inexpensive rates
• Pay as you go model
• Weighted Round Robin
• Self-Aliasing

19. © 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Route 53’s Key Features
High
Availability
DNS
• Highly available and
scalable DNS service.
• Map the root or apex of
your hosted zone to
your Elastic Load
Balancer.
• Run applications in
multiple AWS regions
and route users to the
one that provides the
lowest latency.
• Specify the frequency
with which different
responses are served.
Alias Records
Weighted
Round Robin
Latency Based
Routing

20. © 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Latency Based Routing (LBR)
Run multiple stacks of your application in different
EC2 regions around the world
Create Routing records using the Route 53 API or
Console
• Tag each destination end-point to the EC2 region that it’s in
• End-points can either be EC2 instances, Elastic IPs or ELBs
Route 53 will route end users to the end-point that
provides the lowest latency

21. © 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
LBR Benefits
Better performance than running in
a single region
Improved reliability relative to
running in a single region
Easier implementation than
traditional DNS solutions
Much lower prices than traditional
DNS solutions

22. © 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Pay-as-you-go Pricing
Hosted Zones
• $0.50 per hosted zone / month for the first 25 hosted zones
• $0.10 per hosted zone / month for additional hosted zones
Standard Queries
• $0.500 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month
• $0.250 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month
Latency Based Routing Queries
• $0.750 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month
$0.375 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month
Alias queries for ELBs free of charge

23. © 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Getting Started with LBR
Sign up: aws.amazon.com/route53
Create a Hosted Zone
Create your DNS records, including
LBR Records
Update your domain registrar with
Route 53 name servers

24. Comparison
Traffic Manager Route53
Simple, Round-robin, performance and failover Simple, weighted, round-robin, performance and
failover
Domain Naming system DNS with Authorative (SOA)
REST Endpoint REST and SDK
For now it supports Hosted Services (PaaS) PaaS and IaaS support
Stateless required Cookie based stickiness
CNAME Record Type All types of Record Type

25. Route 53 Demo

26. References
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windowsazure/hh744833.aspx
• http://www.slideshare.net/windowsazure/windows-azure-traffic-
manager-overview
• http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/route-53-latency-
based-routing
• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/Welco
me.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolver_(DNS)#DNS_resolvers
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd197515(v=WS.10).aspx

27. Question?

28. Thank you for attending
Boston Azure Cloud
Usergroup