Amazon Route 53 vs Amazon S3: What are the differences?

Amazon Route 53: A highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. 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; Amazon S3: Store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

Amazon Route 53 can be classified as a tool in the "DNS Management" category, while Amazon S3 is grouped under "Cloud Storage".

Some of the features offered by Amazon Route 53 are:

• 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.

On the other hand, Amazon S3 provides the following key features:

• Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 terabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
• Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
• A bucket can be stored in one of several Regions. You can choose a Region to optimize for latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 is currently available in the US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), South America (Sao Paulo), and GovCloud (US) Regions. The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.

"High-availability", "Simple" and "Backed by amazon" are the key factors why developers consider Amazon Route 53; whereas "Reliable", "Scalable" and "Cheap" are the primary reasons why Amazon S3 is favored.

According to the StackShare community, Amazon S3 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 4148 company stacks & 7691 developers stacks; compared to Amazon Route 53, which is listed in 1825 company stacks and 2499 developer stacks.