Route 53 Routing Policies
Choosing the right DNS routing policy for traffic management, failover, and geo-distribution.
Overview
What is being compared
Route 53 has eight routing policies that decide how a DNS query is answered when several records exist for the same name. The choice affects availability, latency, data residency compliance and disaster recovery. Simple routing is the default; the others serve specific architectural needs.
- Simple — The single record — One resource, no traffic management
- Weighted — In proportion to each record's weight — A/B testing, canary DNS migration, traffic shifting
- Latency — The region with the lowest measured latency for the user — Global apps in several AWS regions
- Failover — Primary while healthy, else secondary — Active-passive disaster recovery
- Geolocation — By the continent or country of the requesting IP — Data residency, language-based routing
- Geoproximity — By distance to the resource, with a configurable bias — Regional distribution with bias
- Multi-value — Up to 8 healthy IP addresses — Basic round-robin with health checks
- IP-based — By the client's CIDR range — On-premises or known IP ranges
> [!WARNING] A geolocation setup with no default record returns NODATA for unmatched locations, and the query fails.
How long a failover really takes
Failover time is the health check's detection plus the TTL that resolvers already hold. The phases run left to right; red is while users still reach the failed region, green is when they reach the healthy one.
> [!TIP] Two regional records under one name, a geolocation lookup and the choice of policy play step by step in Visual Explanation below.
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