In this presentation, created for a webinar recorded on 4/26/2012, we demo'd Amazon Route 53's new Latency Based Routing (LBR) feature. LBR is one of Amazon Route 53’s most requested features and helps improve your application’s performance for a global audience. LBR works by routing your customers to the AWS endpoint (e.g. EC2 instances, Elastic IPs or ELBs) that provides the fastest experience based on actual performance measurements of the different AWS regions where your application is running.

1. Latency Based Routing with Route 53
Alex Dunlap, Sr. Manager, Route 53
Nathan Dye, Software Development Manager, Route 53
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© 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.

2. Agenda
Overview of Amazon Route 53
Overview of Latency Based Routing
Route 53 Case Studies
Demo of Latency Based Routing
Questions
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3. 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
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© 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.

4. How it Works
Where is I don’t know – I’ll
www.example.com? ask the authority
53
Users DNS Resolver Route 53
1.2.3.4 1.2.3.4
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© 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.

5. Design Principles
• Redundant locations • Console
Reliable • Backed with SLA Easy to Use • Programmatic API
• Worldwide anycast network Cost • Inexpensive rates
Fast • Fast propagation of changes • Pay as you go model
Effective
Integrated • ELB-Alias Queries
• Weighted Round Robin
• Latency Based Routing Flexible
with AWS • Self-Aliasing
• More to come
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© 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.

6. Route 53’s Key Features
High • Specify the frequency
• Highly available and Weighted
Availability scalable DNS service.
with which different
Round Robin responses are served.
DNS
• Run applications in
• Map the root or apex of
Latency Based multiple AWS regions
your hosted zone to
Alias Records your Elastic Load
and route users to the
Balancer.
Routing one that provides the
lowest latency.
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© 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.

7. Latency Based Routing (LBR)
Run multiple stacks of your application in different
EC2 regions around the world
Create LBR 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
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© 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.

8. 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
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© 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.

9. 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
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© 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.

10. 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
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© 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.

11. Use Cases
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© 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.

12. foursquare
foursquare builds tools that help you keep up with friends,
discover what’s nearby, save money and unlock deals.
“We wanted to eliminate the need to provision our own DNS
servers. We also use ELB, and needed a solution that would
let us handle DNS requests for the apex of our domain.
Route 53 gave us these features, and we could use its
programmatic API to automate everything into our workflow”
Robert Joseph, foursquare
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© 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.

13. Affine
Affine provides a Contextual Targeting Platform
for online video advertising. Revolutionary Technology
that delivers certainty to
“Our customers bid on video ad inventory in real Advertisers and Agencies
time and our system must evaluate the content
they're sponsoring and respond with a decision
in less than 50ms, or they'll lose the auction.
Route 53’s Latency Based Routing lets us easily
run multiple stacks of our whole targeting
platform in each AWS region so we can meet our
customers latency needs.”
Jonathan Dodson,
Vice President of Engineering at Affine
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© 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.

14. Avos
In 2011, Avos systems acquired multiple domains from Yahoo
associated with delicious.com, a social bookmarking site.
They selected Route 53 because its management console
and ELB integration made it easy to migrate these sites to
AWS infrastructure.
“Route 53 made it very easy to migrate our user traffic and
we were able to move all the properties to AWS on a
Saturday morning. Additionally, the Route 53 console made it
very easy to migrate especially with how well integrated it is
with AWS’ Elastic Load Balancers”
Vijay Krunamurthy, AVOS
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© 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.

15. Academia.edu
Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research
papers.
“We run front-end servers for our site in 5 regions around the
world using Latency Based Routing. Since we’ve
implemented this, we’ve reduced page load times for our end
users by 1-2 seconds. We also learned which servers the
majority of users were near (in terms of latency) which is
making us rethink our general server deployment strategy.”
Ryan Lower, Academia.edu
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© 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.

16. See more case studies at
aws.amazon.com/route53
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17. Demo
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18. Questions?
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© 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.