Amazon Route 53 Announces Metric Based Health Checks, DNS Failover for Private Hosted Zones, and Configurable Health Check Locations

We are excited to announce the launch of three new health checking features for Amazon Route 53:

Metric Based Health Checks let you perform DNS failover based on any metric that is available within Amazon CloudWatch, including AWS-provided metrics and custom metrics from your own application. When you create a metric based health check within Amazon Route 53, the health check becomes unhealthy whenever its associated Amazon CloudWatch metric enters an alarm state.

Metric based health checks are useful to enable DNS failover for endpoints that cannot be reached by a standard Amazon Route 53 health check, such as instances within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that only have private IP addresses. Using Amazon Route 53’s calculated health check feature, you can also accomplish more sophisticated failover scenarios by combining the results of metric based health checks with the results of standard Amazon Route 53 health checks, which make requests against an endpoint from a network of checkers around the world. For example, you can create a configuration which fails away from an endpoint if either its public-facing web page is unavailable, or if internal metrics such as CPU load, network in/out, or disk reads show that the server itself is unhealthy.

With DNS Failover for Private Hosted Zones, it is now possible to associate health checks with resource record sets within a Private DNS hosted zone in order to perform failover among multiple endpoints within a VPC. When combined with metric based health checks, you can now configure DNS failover even for endpoints that only have private IP address and thus cannot be reached by standard Amazon Route 53 health checks. With this release, the creation of Alias records pointing to AWS resources is now also fully supported within private DNS hosted zones.

Configurable Health Check Locations enable you to choose the AWS regions from which you would like each of your Amazon Route 53 health checks to be conducted. For customers who want health status and failover to be determined only by checkers in the same geographic region where their end users are concentrated, it is now possible to choose to run a health check from only the locations that matter most to end users.

Getting started with Amazon Route 53 health checks and DNS failover is easy. To learn more, visit the Amazon Route 53 product page for full details and pricing, or see our documentation.