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  1. Stackups
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  5. Akamai vs Amazon Route 53

Akamai vs Amazon Route 53

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Akamai
Akamai
Stacks1.9K
Followers442
Votes0
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53
Stacks14.5K
Followers9.4K
Votes678

Akamai vs Amazon Route 53: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Akamai and Amazon Route 53, which are both widely used services for managing and optimizing website traffic.

  1. Global Network Coverage: Akamai is known for its extensive global network coverage, comprising numerous servers strategically located in data centers around the world. This allows Akamai to deliver content to end-users from the server that is closest to their location, thereby reducing latency and improving overall website performance. On the other hand, Amazon Route 53 is a domain name system (DNS) web service that provides scalable and reliable DNS for routing end users to website endpoints. While Route 53 operates globally with multiple edge locations, its primary focus is on DNS management rather than content delivery.

  2. Service Options: Akamai offers a wide range of services beyond content delivery, such as cloud security, web application firewall, and DDoS protection. These additional services enhance website security and performance. In contrast, Amazon Route 53 primarily focuses on domain name system management, including domain registration, DNS routing, health checks, and traffic policies. While Route 53 does not provide the same level of additional services as Akamai, it integrates well with other AWS services, making it a popular choice among AWS customers.

  3. Traffic Routing: Akamai uses a complex algorithm called Adaptive Acceleration to intelligently route website traffic based on real-time network conditions, content popularity, and user location. This dynamic routing capability ensures optimal website performance and minimizes congestion. In contrast, Amazon Route 53 provides several routing policies such as simple, weighted, latency-based, geolocation, and failover routing. These policies allow users to define how traffic is distributed among different resources and endpoints based on various factors like geographic location, latency, and health checks.

  4. Ease of Use: Amazon Route 53 is designed to be user-friendly and integrates seamlessly with other AWS services. Its intuitive interface, comprehensive documentation, and APIs make it easier for developers and system administrators to manage DNS settings and domain names. Akamai, on the other hand, typically requires more specialized knowledge and expertise to set up and configure due to its broader range of services and advanced features. It may require more dedicated resources to manage and maintain Akamai configurations effectively.

  5. Scalability and Pricing: Both Akamai and Amazon Route 53 offer scalable solutions, but they have different pricing models. Akamai charges based on the amount of data transferred and additional services used, making it suitable for high-traffic websites with complex needs. On the other hand, Amazon Route 53 offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on the number of queries made and hosted zones, which may be more cost-effective for smaller websites or those primarily focused on DNS management.

  6. Integration with Cloud Providers: While Amazon Route 53 is seamlessly integrated with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings, making it easier to manage DNS and web services within the AWS ecosystem, Akamai can be integrated with a variety of cloud providers, including AWS. This flexibility allows users to choose the cloud provider that best suits their needs while still benefiting from Akamai's content delivery and security services.

In Summary, Akamai offers a global network coverage with additional services beyond content delivery, utilizing complex routing algorithms. Amazon Route 53, on the other hand, focuses primarily on DNS management and integrates well with other AWS services, providing scalable and cost-effective solutions.

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Advice on Akamai, Amazon Route 53

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

Akamai
Akamai
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53

If you've ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you've probably used Akamai's cloud platform. Akamai helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. We remove the complexities of technology, so you can focus on driving your business faster forward.

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.

Protect your apps and APIs, stop credential abuse, and move to a Zero Trust security model with the world’s most powerful edge security platform; Focus on increasing revenue with powerful data and automation built to enhance customer experience on web and mobile applications; Deliver and monetize high-quality and secure online streaming experiences; Quickly integrate Akamai into existing developer workflows, streamlining cloud deployment and delivery
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.
Statistics
Stacks
1.9K
Stacks
14.5K
Followers
442
Followers
9.4K
Votes
0
Votes
678
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
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
Integrations
Cloudinary
Cloudinary
Cloudability
Cloudability
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Akamai, Amazon Route 53?

CloudFlare

CloudFlare

Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

KeyCDN

KeyCDN

KeyCDN offers super fast and secure content delivery for minimal loading time. In addition to the CDN, it also offers advanced image processing and many other features such as live logs and Let's Encrypt SSL.

Fastly

Fastly

Fastly's real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.

MaxCDN

MaxCDN

The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them.

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!

jsDelivr

jsDelivr

jsDelivr is a free CDN for open source developers, with advanced features for javascript projects with access to NPM and Github It uses multiple CDN providers, resulting in the best possible uptime and performance.

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.

Moovweb XDN

Moovweb XDN

All-in-one platform to develop, deploy, preview, experiment on, monitor, and run your frontend.

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