Tutorials Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Jun 4, 2025 4 min read

First Route53 Setup

DNS.

Setup

Create hosted zone. Get name servers; update at domain registrar.

Initial records: A, AAAA for the apex; CNAME or A for www.

TTLs: 300 seconds for development; 3600+ for stable production records.

A: IPv4 address. AAAA: IPv6 address. Most common record types.

CNAME: alias to another domain. Cannot be at apex (use ALIAS instead).

ALIAS: AWS-specific; aliases to AWS resources (CloudFront, ELB).

Simple: one record, one IP. Default for static services.

Weighted: distribute traffic by weight. Useful for canary or blue-green.

Latency-based: route to lowest-latency region. Standard for global active-active.

Failover: primary-secondary with health checks.

DNSSEC for high-security zones. Prevents DNS spoofing.

Health checks for failover routing. Per-endpoint reachability.

Quarterly audit: stale records, unused zones.