Simple Routing Policy: A Comprehensive Guide with Example

What is Simple Routing?

Simple Routing Policy is one of the routing policies offered by Amazon Route 53, a scalable domain name system (DNS) web service. It is the most basic and straightforward routing policy.

Simple routing allows you to configure standard DNS records without employing any advanced Route 53 routing features like weighted or latency-based routing. In the case of basic routing, you typically direct traffic to a single resource, such as a web server hosting your website.

This type of routing policy can be applied to records within a private hosted zone. When opting for the Simple routing policy within the Route 53 console, you cannot create multiple records with the same name and type. However, you have the option to specify multiple values within the same record, such as multiple IP addresses. (For alias records configured with Simple routing, only one AWS resource or one record in the current hosted zone can be specified.) If you provide multiple values in a record, Route 53 will return all of them to the recursive resolver in a random order. The resolver, in turn, relays these values back to the client, such as a web browser, that initiated the DNS query. The client then selects a value and resubmits the query.

It’s important to note that with the basic routing policy, although you can specify multiple IP addresses, these IP addresses are not subject to health checks.