Routing policies determine how Route 53 responds to queries.
When you create a record, you choose a routing policy, which determines how Amazon Route 53 responds to queries:
Simple routing policy – Use for a single resource that performs a given function for your domain, for example, a web server that serves content for the example.com website. You can use simple routing to create records in a private hosted zone. Failover routing policy – Use when you want to configure active-passive failover. You can use failover routing to create records in a private hosted zone. Geolocation routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your users. You can use geolocation routing to create records in a private hosted zone. Geoproximity routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another location. You can use geoproximity routing to create records in a private hosted zone. Latency routing policy – Use when you have resources in multiple AWS Regions and you want to route traffic to the Region that provides the best latency. You can use latency routing to create records in a private hosted zone. IP-based routing policy – Use when you want to route traffic based on the location of your users, and have the IP addresses that the traffic originates from. Multivalue answer routing policy – Use when you want Route 53 to respond to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records selected at random. You can use multivalue answer routing to create records in a private hosted zone. Weighted routing policy – Use to route traffic to multiple resources in proportions that you specify. You can use weighted routing to create records in a private hosted zone. Key function of each Routing Policy
Simple Routing Policy
An A record is associated with one or more IP addresses. Does not support health checks.
Failover Routing Policy
Failover to a secondary IP address. Associated with a health check. Routes only when the resource is healthy. When used with Alias records set Evaluate Target Health to “Yes” and do not use health checks.
Geo-location Routing Policy
Caters to different users in different countries and different languages. Contains users within a particular geography and offers them a customised version of the workload based on their specific needs. Geolocation can be used for localising content and presenting some or all your website in the language of your users. Can also protect distribution rights. Can be used for spreading load evenly between regions. If you have multiple records for overlapping regions, Route 53 will route to the smallest geographic region. You can create a default record for IP addresses that do not map to a geographic location.
Geo-proximity routing policy:
Use for routing traffic based on the location of resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another.
Latency Routing Policy
AWS maintains a database of latency from different parts of the world.
Focused on improving performance by routing to the region with the lowest latency. You create latency records for your resources in multiple EC2 locations.
Multi-value Answer Routing Policy
Use for responding to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records selected at random. Weighted Routing Policy
Like simple but you can specify a weight per IP address. You create records that have the same name and type and assign each record a relative weight. Numerical value that favours one IP over another. To stop sending traffic to a resource you can change the weight of the record to 0.