What are Hosted Zones in Route 53?
A Hosted Zone in Amazon Route 53 is a container for DNS records that define how traffic is routed for a specific domain (e.g., example.com) or subdomain (e.g., app.example.com). It acts as the starting point for managing DNS settings for a domain within AWS.
Each hosted zone is associated with a single domain name and contains the DNS records needed to route traffic to the appropriate resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, load balancers, or external servers.
Types of Hosted Zones :
-
Public Hosted Zones:
- Used to manage DNS records for a public domain that is accessible on the internet.
- Example: Configuring DNS records for
www.example.com to point to an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) or an S3 bucket.
-
Private Hosted Zones:
- Used to manage DNS records for domains within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
- These records are not publicly accessible and are intended for internal use within a VPC.
- Example: Configuring internal DNS names like
internal.example.local for private EC2 instances within a VPC.
How Hosted Zones Work :
-
Domain Registration:
- You can either register a domain name with Route 53 or transfer an existing domain from another registrar to Route 53.
- Once registered, a hosted zone is automatically created for that domain.
-
Nameservers:
- Each hosted zone is assigned a set of Route 53 nameservers (NS records).
- These nameservers must be updated at your domain registrar (if it's external) to direct DNS queries to Route 53.
-
DNS Records:
- Within a hosted zone, you define DNS records (e.g., A, CNAME, MX, TXT) to specify how traffic should be routed.
- Example DNS records:
- A Record: Maps
example.com to an IP address.
- CNAME Record: Maps
www.example.com to example.com.
-
Routing Traffic:
- Route 53 uses the hosted zone and its records to route user requests to the correct endpoints (e.g., an EC2 instance, S3 bucket, or external server).
