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  5. Amazon Route 53 vs BIND9

Amazon Route 53 vs BIND9

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53
Stacks14.5K
Followers9.4K
Votes678
BIND9
BIND9
Stacks50
Followers53
Votes0

Amazon Route 53 vs BIND9: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison between Amazon Route 53 and BIND9, highlighting the key differences between the two.

  1. Performance and Scalability: Amazon Route 53 is a highly scalable DNS web service that is designed to handle large amounts of traffic efficiently. It uses highly distributed infrastructure and global anycast network to ensure low latency and high query resolution speed. On the other hand, BIND9 is a widely used open-source DNS software that can be deployed on a variety of server platforms. While it can also handle a significant amount of traffic, it may require more manual configuration and optimization to achieve the same level of performance and scalability as Amazon Route 53.

  2. Managed Service vs Self-hosted: Amazon Route 53 is a managed DNS service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). This means that Amazon takes care of the infrastructure, maintenance, and updates, allowing users to focus on their applications. In contrast, BIND9 is a self-hosted DNS solution that requires users to deploy and manage the software on their own servers. This gives users more control and flexibility but also requires them to have the necessary expertise and resources to handle the deployment and ongoing maintenance.

  3. Global DNS Infrastructure: Amazon Route 53 has a global infrastructure that spans across multiple continents, with a large number of DNS servers distributed strategically. This allows for faster and more reliable global DNS resolution, reducing latency and providing better overall performance for users accessing websites from different geographic locations. On the other hand, BIND9 deployments are typically limited to specific servers or data centers, which may result in higher latency and slower DNS resolution for users located far away from the server.

  4. Advanced Traffic Routing and Load Balancing: Amazon Route 53 offers advanced traffic routing capabilities, such as geographic routing, latency-based routing, and weighted round-robin routing. These features allow users to easily route traffic to different endpoints based on factors like the geographic location of the user, the latency between the user and the endpoint, or the distribution of traffic among multiple endpoints. BIND9, being a DNS software, does not provide these advanced routing and load balancing features out of the box, although they can be implemented using additional tools or configurations.

  5. Integration with AWS Services: Amazon Route 53 seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, such as Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon EC2, and Amazon S3. This integration allows for automatic DNS updates and simplifies the management of DNS records for AWS resources. BIND9, being a standalone DNS software, does not have built-in integration with AWS services and might require additional configuration or manual updates to synchronize DNS records with AWS resources.

  6. Pricing and Cost: Amazon Route 53 is a paid service, and its pricing is based on the usage of the service, including the number of queries and hosted zones. The cost can vary depending on the traffic volume and the specific features used. On the other hand, BIND9 is an open-source software and can be deployed without any licensing costs. However, the cost of using BIND9 includes the infrastructure, maintenance, and resources required to run and manage the servers hosting the DNS.

In Summary, Amazon Route 53 and BIND9 differ in terms of scalability and performance, managed service vs self-hosted deployment, global DNS infrastructure, advanced traffic routing and load balancing capabilities, integration with AWS services, and pricing and cost considerations.

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Advice on Amazon Route 53, BIND9

Eric
Eric

Service Engineer at Zix Corporation

Aug 5, 2020

Needs adviceonAmazon Route 53Amazon Route 53

We are looking for advice / best-practices / caveats about migrating off BIND on to Unbound https://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/ for internal & external (customer-facing) DNS. Is unbound suitable for this, or is it only recommended for caching? How easy or difficult is it to move 10000's of existing BIND DNS zone entries? We already use Amazon Route 53 for our AWS instances and Cloud DNS for our GCP ones, but would like to maintain internal DNS for cost, control, and latency reasons.

58.6k views58.6k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53
BIND9
BIND9

Amazon Route 53 is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) – such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.

It is a versatile name server software. It has evolved to be a very flexible, full-featured DNS system. Whatever your application is, it probably has the required features.

Highly Available and Reliable – Route 53 is built using AWS’s highly available and reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of our DNS servers helps ensure a consistent ability to route your end users to your application. Route 53 is designed to provide the level of dependability required by important applications. Amazon Route 53 is backed by the Amazon Route 53 Service Level Agreement.;Scalable – Route 53 is designed to automatically scale to handle very large query volumes without any intervention from you.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Route 53 is designed to work well with other AWS features and offerings. You can use Route 53 to map domain names to your Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and other AWS resources. By using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service with Route 53, you get fine grained control over who can update your DNS data. You can use Route 53 to map your zone apex (example.com versus www.example.com) to your Elastic Load Balancing instance or Amazon S3 website bucket using a feature called Alias record.;Simple – With self-service sign-up, Route 53 can start to answer your DNS queries within minutes. You can configure your DNS settings with the AWS Management Console or our easy-to-use API. You can also programmatically integrate the Route 53 API into your overall web application. For instance, you can use Route 53’s API to create a new DNS record whenever you create a new EC2 instance.;Fast – Using a global anycast network of DNS servers around the world, Route 53 is designed to automatically route your users to the optimal location depending on network conditions. As a result, the service offers low query latency for your end users, as well as low update latency for your DNS record management needs.;Cost-Effective – Route 53 passes on the benefits of AWS’s scale to you. You pay only for managing domains through the service and the number of queries that the service answers for each of your domains, at a low cost and without minimum usage commitments or any up-front fees.;Secure – By integrating Route 53 with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), you can grant unique credentials and manage permissions for every user within your AWS account and specify who has access to which parts of the Route 53 service.;Flexible – Route 53 offers Weighted Round-Robin (WRR), also known as DNS load balancing. This lets you assign weights to your DNS records that specify what portion of your traffic is routed to various endpoints.
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Statistics
Stacks
14.5K
Stacks
50
Followers
9.4K
Followers
53
Votes
678
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 185
    High-availability
  • 148
    Simple
  • 103
    Backed by amazon
  • 76
    Fast
  • 54
    Auhtoritive dns servers are spread over different tlds
Cons
  • 2
    Geo-based routing only works with AWS zones
  • 2
    SLOW
  • 1
    Restrictive rate limit
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Amazon Route 53, BIND9?

DNSimple

DNSimple

DNSimple provides the tools you need to manage your domains. We offer both a carefully crafted web interface for managing your domains and DNS records, as well as an HTTP API with various code libraries and tools. Buy, connect, operate!

Google Cloud DNS

Google Cloud DNS

Use Google's infrastructure for production quality, high volume DNS serving. Your users will have reliable, low-latency access to Google's infrastructure from anywhere in the world using our network of Anycast name servers.

Dyn

Dyn

An all-in-one Managed DNS service for your registered domain names. Dyn DNS is the perfect solution for your domain name’s DNS needs, whether it is for personal or business use. It gives you complete control over your DNS zone and its associated DNS records, complete with a simple DNS management web interface.

DNS Made Easy

DNS Made Easy

DNS Made Easy is a subsidiary of Tiggee LLC, and is a world leader in providing global IP Anycast enterprise DNS services. DNS Made Easy is currently ranked the fastest provider for 8 consecutive months and the most reliable provider.

NS1

NS1

NS1’s intelligent DNS & traffic management platform, with its data driven architecture and unique Filter Chain routing engine, is purpose-built for the most demanding, mission-critical applications on the Internet.

CoreDNS

CoreDNS

CoreDNS is a DNS server. It is written in Go. It can be used in a multitude of environments because of its flexibility

nextdns

nextdns

Cloud-based private DNS service that gives you full control over what is allowed and what is blocked on the Internet. Think of it as a combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-hole®.

InboxKit

InboxKit

InboxKit automates your entire cold email infrastructure. Buy domains, provision Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 mailboxes, configure DNS, and export to 16+ sequencers — all from one dashboard. Scale from 10 to 10,000 mailboxes without the manual setup headache.

Modern DDoS Protection & Edge Security Platform

Modern DDoS Protection & Edge Security Platform

Protect and accelerate your apps with Trafficmind’s global edge — DDoS defense, WAF, API security, CDN/DNS, 99.99% uptime and 24/7 expert team.

PowerDNS

PowerDNS

It features a large number of different backends ranging from simple BIND style zonefiles to relational databases and load balancing/failover algorithms. A DNS recursor is provided as a separate program.

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