- Amazon Route 53 accelerated recovery simplifies DNS changes
- Amazon claims the eastern US is reliable; last month’s outage is another story
- The tool is publicly available and can be used for free.
In response to customer demand for greater DNS resiliency, AWS has committed to making fundamental changes to improve availability and ensure business continuity.
This is because DNS issues have been largely responsible for some of the recent major outages in the US East AWS region.
Calling itself “Accelerated Recovery for Amazon Route 53,” Amazon promises a recovery time objective (RTO) of 60 minutes for service outages in this region, also known as Northern Virginia.
Amazon wants to reduce downtime in the eastern US
“This enhancement ensures customers can continue to make DNS changes and provision infrastructure even during regional outages, providing greater predictability and resiliency for mission-critical applications,” Amazon said in a blog post.
The company prides itself on its “exceptional uptime across its global infrastructure”, but as highly regulated industries such as banking, FinTech and SaaS need to implement DNS changes in the event of an outage, the company has introduced accelerated recovery.
AWS also said that the US East region is no less reliable than other regions, but a 2022 Gartner study warned that this was a structural weakness (according to the record).
AWS recently suffered a major data center outage in the eastern US, disrupting apps, websites and other connected services around the world, including its own Ring Doorbells, Snapchat and Duolingo. A DynamoDNS issue was the cause.
Senior Solutions Architect Micah Walter emphasized that customers do not need to learn new APIs or modify existing automation scripts to take advantage of Route 53’s accelerated recovery. “Organizations can continue to make critical DNS changes, deploy new infrastructure, and reroute data flows without having to wait or restore full service,” concluded Walter.
Quick restore for public Amazon Route 53 zones is widely available and, best of all, free of charge. Private hosting areas are not allowed.