Amazon Latency Based Routing (LBR)
Amazon LBR is a long awaited, anycast-like DNS feature of the Amazon Route 53 DNS service. It allows organizations and developers with geographically disbursed applications deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the ability to create Latency Resource Record Sets (LRRS) in routing inbound traffic to the closest application location.
This service can be deployed to ensure that ingress traffic to resources hosted on AWS reaches the closest (lowest latent) EC2 instance, Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), or Elastic IP Address specified in a Route53 DNS record. This will work for Route53 DNS CNAME‘s, A and AAAA records, and A ALIAS records, also known as weighted round-robin records (WRR).
In the above example, there are three identical application servers with the hostname APP-01. Each of these servers could be individual EC2 instances with a Route 53 DNS CNAME record pointing to their assigned AWS hostname (ex: app-01.domain.tld > ec2-172-16-90-145.compute-1.amazonaws.com) or Route 53 A ALIAS records for app-01.domain.tld pointing to their Elastic Load Balancers’ AWS hostnames in this example.
When a DNS request is made from the client for app-01.domain.tld, Route 53 determines the IP address to return to the client based off of its complex network latency metrics, and the client is routed to the lowest latency target .. in this case to app-01 in the US-EAST-1 region.
To ensure that global application servers are not overwhelmed in a single region, series of weighted resource record sets can be created, which gives control for throttling the requests to particular regions or hosted AWS resources.
Similar strategies for accomplishing this type of low latency DNS-based routing are global server load balancing (GSLB) and anycast DNS.
If you host your application on AWS and would like close the gap for serving your AWS web applications, web site or hosted content on a global scale with very low latency, we offer consulting, deployment and optimization services to turbocharge your product to the global marketplace with Route53 and Amazon latency based Routing.
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