Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,
We're excited to introduce today a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) service - Amazon Route 53. It is designed to give developers and businesses a 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.
A reliable, cloud-based DNS service has been one of the most requested offerings by our customers. With Route 53, you can create a "hosted zone" to add DNS records for a new domain or transfer DNS records for a domain you currently own. Route 53 is also designed to work well with other AWS offerings, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). By using AWS IAM with Route 53, you can control who in your organization can make changes to your DNS records. In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name, and the ability to route your customers to the closest EC2 region.
Route 53 is also designed to be fast and simple. It uses a global network of DNS servers to respond to end users with low latency and has an easy-to-use, self-service API. There are no long-term contracts or minimum usage commitments for using Route 53 - you pay $1.00 per month for the hosted zones you manage, $0.50 per million queries for the first billion queries, and $0.25 per million queries above a billion.