StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Infrastructure as a Service
  4. Dns Management
  5. AWS CloudTrail vs Amazon Route 53

AWS CloudTrail vs Amazon Route 53

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53
Stacks14.5K
Followers9.4K
Votes678
AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Stacks304
Followers280
Votes14

AWS CloudTrail vs Amazon Route 53: What are the differences?

Key Differences between AWS CloudTrail and Amazon Route 53

AWS CloudTrail and Amazon Route 53 are two widely used services in Amazon Web Services (AWS) for different purposes. It is important to understand their key differences in order to determine which service to choose for your specific requirements.

  1. Functionality: AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of the AWS account. It provides a detailed record of every API call made within the AWS infrastructure. On the other hand, Amazon Route 53 is a scalable domain name system (DNS) web service for routing end users to internet applications. It is primarily used for domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking of resources.

  2. Use Case: AWS CloudTrail is primarily used for security and auditing purposes. It helps in tracking changes made to the AWS environment, identifying security breaches, and facilitating compliance with regulatory requirements. Amazon Route 53, on the other hand, is used for managing DNS and routing traffic to various resources, including EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and load balancers.

  3. Logging and Monitoring: AWS CloudTrail provides detailed logs of API calls made within the AWS infrastructure. These logs can be stored in Amazon S3 or delivered to Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and analysis. In contrast, Amazon Route 53 does not provide detailed logs of DNS queries or traffic. However, it does offer basic DNS query logging and DNS query logging with VPC Flow Logs, which can be used for monitoring and analysis.

  4. Pricing: AWS CloudTrail has a pay-per-use pricing model based on the number of events logged and data transfer. It offers a free tier that includes limited logs and events per account. On the other hand, Amazon Route 53 has a separate pricing structure based on the number of hosted zones, record sets, and DNS queries.

  5. Integration and Automation: AWS CloudTrail integrates with other AWS services such as AWS CloudWatch, AWS Config, and AWS S3 for enhanced monitoring, analysis, and archival of logs. It can also be automated using AWS CloudTrail's APIs and SDKs. Amazon Route 53 integrates with other AWS services as well, such as EC2, CloudFront, and ELB, for easy configuration and management of DNS records.

  6. Global Availability: AWS CloudTrail is available in all AWS regions, making it suitable for global deployments. Amazon Route 53 also has global availability and supports domain registration and DNS routing for various geographic locations.

In summary, AWS CloudTrail is focused on security, compliance, and auditing of AWS API calls, while Amazon Route 53 is primarily used for managing DNS and routing traffic to internet applications.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Amazon Route 53, AWS CloudTrail

Jigar
Jigar

Security Software Engineer at Cisco

Jul 2, 2020

Needs adviceonAWS IAMAWS IAMAmazon EC2Amazon EC2Splunk CloudSplunk Cloud

We would like to detect unusual config changes that can potentially cause production outage.

Such as, SecurityGroup new allow/deny rule, AuthZ policy change, Secret key/certificate rotation, IP subnet add/drop. The problem is the source of all of these activities is different, i.e., AWS IAM, Amazon EC2, internal prod services, envoy sidecar, etc.

Which of the technology would be best suitable to detect only IMP events (not all activity) from various sources all workload running on AWS and also Splunk Cloud?

168k views168k
Comments
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
AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail

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.

With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.

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.
Increased Visibility- CloudTrail provides increased visibility into your user activity by recording AWS API calls. You can answer questions such as, what actions did a given user take over a given time period? For a given resource, which user has taken actions on it over a given time period? What is the source IP address of a given activity? Which activities failed due to inadequate permissions?;Durable and Inexpensive Log File Storage- CloudTrail uses Amazon S3 for log file storage and delivery, so log files are stored durably and inexpensively. You can use Amazon S3 lifecycle configuration rules to further reduce storage costs. For example, you can define rules to automatically delete old log files or archive them to Amazon Glacier for additional savings.;Easy Administration- CloudTrail is a fully managed service; you simply turn on CloudTrail for your account using the AWS Management Console, the Command Line Interface, or the CloudTrail SDK and start receiving CloudTrail log files in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket that you specify.;Reliable- CloudTrail continuously transports events from AWS services using a highly available and fault tolerant processing pipeline.;Timely Delivery- CloudTrail typically delivers events within 15 minutes of the API call.;Log File Aggregation- CloudTrail can be configured to aggregate log files across multiple accounts and regions so that log files are delivered to a single bucket. Please refer to the of the AWS CloudTrail User Guide for detailed instructions.;Notifications for Log File Delivery- CloudTrail can be configured to publish a notification for each log file delivered, thus enabling you to automatically take action upon log file delivery. CloudTrail uses the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for notifications.;Choice of Partner Solutions- Multiple partners including AlertLogic, Boundary, Loggly, Splunk and Sumologic offer integrated solutions to analyze CloudTrail log files. These solutions include features like change tracking, troubleshooting, and security analysis.
Statistics
Stacks
14.5K
Stacks
304
Followers
9.4K
Followers
280
Votes
678
Votes
14
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
    SLOW
  • 2
    Geo-based routing only works with AWS zones
  • 1
    Restrictive rate limit
Pros
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Very powerful
  • 2
    Backup to S3
Integrations
No integrations available
Boundary
Boundary
Loggly
Loggly
Splunk Cloud
Splunk Cloud

What are some alternatives to Amazon Route 53, AWS CloudTrail?

Papertrail

Papertrail

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

Logmatic

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Loggly

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Logentries

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Logstash

Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

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!

Graylog

Graylog

Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.

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.

Sematext

Sematext

Sematext pulls together performance monitoring, logs, user experience and synthetic monitoring that tools organizations need to troubleshoot performance issues faster.

Fluentd

Fluentd

Fluentd collects events from various data sources and writes them to files, RDBMS, NoSQL, IaaS, SaaS, Hadoop and so on. Fluentd helps you unify your logging infrastructure.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

Postman
Swagger UI

Postman vs Swagger UI

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp