AWS is building a new DNS backstop to prevent further outages

• Accelerated recovery for Amazon’s Route 53 makes it easier to make DNS changes
• Amazon asserts US East is reliable – last month’s outage begs to differ
• The tool is generally available and free to use

Acknowledging customer demand for stronger DNS resilience, AWS has promised to make some fundamental changes to improve uptime and ensure business continuity.

This comes against a backdrop of DNS issues recently being largely responsible for some of the biggest outages in AWS’ US East region.

Dubbed Accelerated recovery for Amazon Route 53, Amazon promises a 60-minute recovery time objective (RTO) during service disruptions in this region, otherwise known as North Virginia.

Amazon wants to reduce US East downtime

“This enhancement ensures that customers can continue making DNS changes and provisioning infrastructure even during regional outages, providing greater predictability and resilience for mission-critical applications,” Amazon explained in a blog post.

The company boasts “exceptional availability across [its] global infrastructure,” but because highly regulated industries like banking, FinTech and SaaS need to make DNS changes during disruptions, the company has launched Accelerated recovery.

AWS also maintained that its US East region is no less reliable than its other regions, but 2022 Gartner research warned that this is a structural weak point (per The Register).

AWS recently suffered a major outage in its US East data center, disrupting applications, websites and other connected services globally, including its own Ring doorbells, Snapchat and Duolingo. A DynamoDNS issue was at blame.

Senior Solutions Architect Micah Walter stressed that customers don’t need to learn new APIs or modify existing automation scripts to use Route 53’s Accelerated recovery. “Organizations can continue to make critical DNS changes, provision new infrastructure, and redirect traffic flows without waiting or full service restoration,” Walter summarized.

Accelerated recovery for Amazon Route 53 public hosted zones is generally available, and best of all, it doesn’t cost anything. Private hosted zones are not supported.

Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.