Amazon Route 53 offers a powerful set of routing policies to control how DNS queries are resolved. Choosing the right one can improve your app's performance, availability, and resilience.

Let’s break down the 8 Route 53 routing policies, explain how they work, and when to use each—with real-world examples.

1️⃣ Simple Routing

🧠 What It Does:

Basic one-to-one routing to a single resource (like an EC2 instance, load balancer, or S3 website).

📦 Use Case:

  • Static website hosted in S3
  • Single-region application

🔧 Example:

example.com → 192.0.2.1

2️⃣ Weighted Routing

🧠 What It Does:

Distributes traffic across multiple resources based on assigned weights.

📦 Use Case:

  • Canary deployments or gradual traffic shifting
  • Load testing a new version of your app

🔧 Example:

80% traffic → us-east-1
20% traffic → eu-west-1

3️⃣ Latency-based Routing

🧠 What It Does:

Routes users to the region with the lowest latency (fastest response time).

📦 Use Case:

  • Global applications hosted in multiple AWS regions
  • Want users to reach the nearest AWS location for performance

🔧 Example:

User in Germany → eu-central-1
User in US → us-east-1

4️⃣ Geolocation Routing

🧠 What It Does:

Routes traffic based on the user’s country or continent (from IP geolocation).

📦 Use Case:

  • Content localization or compliance-based routing
  • Serve different pages or services based on region

🔧 Example:

Users from India → india.example.com
Users from US → us.example.com

5️⃣ Geo-proximity Routing (with Route 53 Traffic Flow)

🧠 What It Does:

Routes traffic based on proximity to a location, and allows bias adjustments to influence routing.

📦 Use Case:

  • Control traffic at fine-tuned geographic boundaries
  • Regional load balancing with control over percentage shifts

🔧 Example:

Shift 10% of EU traffic to the US by biasing

Germany → eu-west-1 (unless biased)

⚠️ Requires Route 53 Traffic Flow and Route 53 health checks

6️⃣ Failover Routing

🧠 What It Does:

Routes traffic to a primary resource, and fails over to a secondary resource if the primary is unhealthy.

📦 Use Case:

  • High availability architectures
  • Active-passive failover setups

🔧 Example:

Primary: EC2 in us-east-1  
Secondary: EC2 in us-west-2

🌐 Multivalue Answer Routing (MVA)

🧠 What it does:

When a DNS query comes in, Route 53 returns multiple healthy IP addresses (A records) from a set.

  • The client (browser or OS) picks one to connect to.
  • Think of it like a mini load balancer inside DNS.

✅ When to Use:

  • You have multiple endpoints (e.g., EC2 instances or on-prem servers).
  • You want basic load balancing and redundancy without setting up an ELB.
  • Useful for non-HTTP apps, like game servers, IoT, or UDP-based services.

🔧 Example:

You configure:

example.com → [192.0.2.1, 192.0.2.2, 192.0.2.3]

If one goes down, Route 53 health checks exclude it from responses.

🔍 Analogy:

It’s like saying: “Here are 3 doors—try one of them. If one’s broken, pick another.”

8️⃣ IP-based Routing (New)

🧠 What it does:

Routes traffic based on the specific IP address or range of the user making the DNS request.

You define rules like:
192.168.0.0/24 → VIP server
        10.0.0.0/8 → corporate access route
Think of this as personalized DNS routing based on user identity (via IP).

✅ When to Use:

  • You want to segregate users by IP (e.g., premium vs free users).
  • You want to route corporate vs public traffic differently.
  • You need custom logic per region, ISP, or customer base at the IP level.

🔧 Example:

If user's IP is 203.0.113.0/24 → route to vip.example.com  
Else → route to standard.example.com

🔍 Analogy:

It’s like a VIP airport lane: “If your IP matches a list, go to the express route.

💬 Final Thoughts

Choosing the right routing policy can improve performance, resilience, and user experience. Often, combining multiple policies (e.g., failover + latency) gives the best results.

Have you used Route 53 in a creative or complex architecture?
Drop a comment or like if you found this breakdown helpful!