Route53

Amazon Route 53

When to Use

• Create or diagnose public/private records, weighted or failover routing, and health checks.
• Configure DNS Firewall, Route 53 Profiles, hybrid Resolver endpoints, Outposts, or Global Resolver.
• Investigate DNS answers, delegation, propagation, policy selection, or resolver behavior.
• Route CloudFront custom-domain work to routing-traffic-with-route53-and-cloudfront.

Do not use this skill for VPC routing, load balancer configuration, or CloudFront-side certificate and distribution changes.

Prerequisites and Quick Reference

• Confirm the account, hosted-zone ID, exact record name/type, intended TTL, current answers, and rollback value before mutation.
• Prefer read-only list-resource-record-sets, delegation, and resolver checks before a change batch.
• Use explicit change batches and retain the Route 53 change ID; never expose credentials or Global Resolver access-token values.
• Read the matching reference in the task table and apply its completion checks.

Overview

Domain expertise for configuring Amazon Route 53 DNS across the public and private resolution paths: hosted zone records, traffic-steering routing policies, health checks, DNS Firewall, Route 53 Profiles, VPC Resolver (also known as Route 53 Resolver) for hybrid and Outposts networks, and Global Resolver.

This skill is a router. Each customer task maps to a procedure file under references/. Read the matching reference in full before acting, then follow its constraints and steps. The reference files are self-contained: each carries its own decision tables, constraints, procedure, and troubleshooting.

Execute commands using the AWS MCP server when connected (sandboxed execution, audit logging, observability). Fall back to the AWS CLI otherwise. All Route 53 Domains API calls are made in us-east-1 regardless of where the customer works.

Which Route 53 task do you need?

Routing notes

• Records vs routing policies. A plain hostname-to-target mapping is the public DNS record task. Splitting or steering traffic (weighted, failover) is a separate routing-policy task with its own reference. Start from the customer's intent, not the record type.
• Health checks vs failover. A health check monitors an endpoint and raises alarms. The failover routing policy decides where traffic goes when a check fails. They are two references and are often used together: set up the health check, then wire it into failover.
• DNS Firewall for one VPC vs many accounts. Authoring rules for a VPC is the blocking reference. Fanning the same protection across accounts with Profiles and Firewall Manager is the centralizing reference.
• DNS Firewall authoring vs diagnosis. Creating or changing rules is the blocking reference. Working out which rule already wins for a domain when several rule groups are associated (a read and diagnostic task) is the identifying-the-effective-rule reference.
• Profiles, two entry points. General Profile setup (attach resources, share via RAM, cost and visibility tradeoffs) is the configuring-Profiles reference. Using Profiles specifically to scale DNS Firewall org-wide is the centralizing reference.
• VPC Resolver, three contexts. In-Region hybrid resolution, the Outposts-local resolver, and the Global Resolver anycast endpoint are three separate references. Match the reference to where the resolver runs.

Cross-service work

Pointing a custom domain at a CloudFront distribution, or failing over between CloudFront distributions, is cross-service work owned by the separate routing-traffic-with-route53-and-cloudfront skill. Use this skill for the Route 53 side of pure-Route 53 tasks only.

Verification and Recovery

1. Wait for the submitted change ID to report INSYNC; this proves propagation through Route 53's control plane, not that every resolver cache has expired.
2. Query authoritative name servers and at least one intended resolver. Assert record type, value, TTL, routing-policy identifiers, and health behavior rather than checking only that an answer exists.
3. Verify an application-level request when DNS is part of a service cutover.
4. If assertions fail, stop further batches and submit a reviewed inverse change using the captured pre-change values. Respect prior TTLs and negative caching; do not repeatedly edit records while caches are converging.

Evaluation Prompts

• Normal: “Create a weighted Route 53 canary record and show how to verify the policy.”
• Difficult edge: “Diagnose intermittent failover where the change is INSYNC but recursive resolvers still return an old answer.”
• Should not activate: “Configure CloudFront cache behavior and origin access control.”

Source Boundary

Route 53 service behavior is sourced from AWS documentation and the imported Apache-2.0 upstream. The pre-change snapshot, multi-layer assertions, and inverse-change recovery procedure are curator recommendations.

Security Considerations

These apply across the Route 53 tasks below; each reference repeats the ones load-bearing for its workflow.

• You SHOULD use least-privilege IAM credentials provisioned through IAM roles (instance profiles, SSO/IAM Identity Center session credentials, or aws sts assume-role) rather than long-lived IAM user access keys, and prefer read-only credentials for inspection steps.
• You SHOULD recommend encrypted DNS transport (DoT or DoH) over plaintext Do53 for resolver client populations, since Do53 exposes queried domain names to on-path observers.
• You MUST scope resolver-endpoint security group rules on port 53 to the on-premises CIDR ranges or known DNS server IPs, never 0.0.0.0/0.
• You MUST encrypt query log and notification destinations at rest: KMS on CloudWatch Logs log groups, SSE-S3/SSE-KMS on S3 buckets, server-side encryption (SSE) on a Data Firehose stream, and SSE on SNS topics, because DNS query logs and health-check notifications can reveal infrastructure topology.
• For Global Resolver, you MUST treat access-token value returned at create time as a secret; store it in AWS Secrets Manager rather than in plaintext, and validate which client populations each DNS view authorizes.

Additional Resources

• Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide
• Amazon Route 53 product page
• Route 53 pricing