Route53 Concepts

This section describes the important concepts for the Route53 service and for Domain Name System (DNS)

Public and Private Hosted Zones

A public hosted zone describes how to route traffic for a public domain, such as example.com, and its subdomains. Information in a public hosted zone is available to anyone that can connect to your Eucalyptus deployment.

A private hosted zone describes how to route traffic for a domain and its subdomains within a VPC managed using Eucalyptus EC2 VPC service. Private zones are useful for repeatable deployments using well-known names.

Resource Record Sets

After you create a hosted zone for your domain, such as example.com, you create resource record sets to tell the Domain Name System (DNS) how to route traffic for that domain.

For example you would create an A record to map the name resource.example.com to the public IP address of an EC2 instance.

DNS Concepts

Important concepts related to underlying DNS functionality are:

  • Alias : An alias connects a name to a cloud resource such as an Elastic Load Balancer
  • CName : A CNAME resource record redirects to another name. CNAMES are often used with S3 buckets.
  • IP Address : An A resource record maps a name to an IP address used to access a resource such as an EC2 instance.
  • TTL : The Time To Live (TTL) of a resource record is important for controlling how long clients can cache DNS information.