What is multivalue routing Route 53?

Routing policies are the rules and algorithms that route traffic to different endpoints, such as IP addresses, AWS resources, or other domain names, based on various criteria. These routing policies provide flexibility and control over how traffic is distributed to different endpoints, allowing users to optimize the performance, availability, and cost-effectiveness of their applications and services hosted on AWS.

Route 53 offers several routing policies to allow users to implement sophisticated traffic routing strategies tailored to their specific requirements. Here, we'll explore the weighted routing policy.

Multivalue routing policy

Multivalue routing policy combines elements of simple routing and failover routing to improve availability and fault tolerance. With multivalue routing, users can create multiple records with the same name, each associated with its health check. When a user queries a domain, up to eight healthy records are returned, excluding unhealthy ones. If more than eight healthy records exist, Route 53 randomly selects and returns a subset of them to the user. This approach enhances availability by adopting an active-activeIn this a setup where multiple identical or synchronized instances of a service or application are actively serving requests simultaneously. In this configuration, all instances are capable of processing requests. approach to DNS, making it suitable for scenarios where multiple resources can handle service requests and need to be health-checked and returned randomly.

The illustration below shows how multivalue routing works in Route 53:

This policy best suits scenarios where multiple identical resources must be health-checked and returned randomly, such as distributed microservices architectures or global load balancing across multiple data centers.

Conclusion

The multivalue routing policy in Amazon Route 53 effectively enhances availability and fault tolerance by combining elements of simple routing and failover routing. This policy allows users to create multiple records with the same name, each associated with a health check, ensuring that only healthy records are returned to users. By randomly selecting up to eight healthy records, Route 53 adopts an active-active approach to DNS, making it ideal for scenarios such as distributed microservices architectures or global load balancing across multiple data centers. This ensures robust performance and high availability for applications that rely on multiple identical resources.