An AWS outage took down nearly the entire Internet. Time to Understand AWS DNS Resolution.

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🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE

Understanding AWS DNS Resolution

The recent AWS (US-EAST-1) outage proved once again how a small DNS glitch can bring half the internet down, and no better time to lens through DNS.

What is DNS?

DNS (Domain Name System) is a distributed database that maps human-readable domain names to machine-readable IP addresses. It lets users and applications connect to services using names like techopsexamples.com instead of numeric IPs such as 203.0.113.8.

What is DNS Resolution?

DNS resolution is the lookup process where a resolver contacts a series of DNS servers to obtain the IP address of a domain.

Let us start with the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) breakdown, which is the foundation of how DNS resolution works.

When you type a URL like https://data.www.techopsexamples.com., each part has a role:

• Protocol: Defines how data moves, such as http or https

• Subdomain: Organizes services like api, dev, or data

• Domain Name: The unique human readable address that represents a resource on the internet, such as techopsexamples.com

• SLD (Second Level Domain): The main identifier of your site, here it is techopsexamples

• TLD (Top Level Domain): The extension that categorizes domains, such as .com, .org, .net, .edu, or .gov

• Root: The hidden dot at the end representing the start of the DNS hierarchy

This is how a DNS query travels through multiple servers to resolve a domain into its IP address.

Route 53 is AWS’s managed and authoritative DNS service that offers reliable, fast, and scalable domain name resolution. It supports both public and private DNS zones, giving full control over how domains are mapped to AWS resources.

It is globally distributed for high availability, acts as a domain registrar, and includes built in health checks to monitor endpoint status. Route 53 stands out as the only AWS service backed by a 100% availability SLA.

Route 53 supports standard DNS record types such as:

• A / AAAA: Maps domain names to IPv4 or IPv6 addresses.

• CNAME: Redirects one domain name to another.

• MX: Defines mail servers for a domain.

• TXT: Stores verification or descriptive text data.

• Alias: AWS specific record type that maps directly to AWS resources like CloudFront, ELB, or S3 without an IP.

A Hosted Zone is a container for records within a domain.

• Public Hosted Zone: Used for internet facing domains, resolvable globally.

• Private Hosted Zone: Used within a VPC for internal name resolution.

With this basic understanding, let us visually explore the different types of DNS resolution in a VPC.

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