AWS recently announced that Amazon Route 53 Resolver is now available on AWS Outposts rack providing on-premises services and applications with local Domain Name Service (DNS) resolution directly from Outposts. In addition, local Route 53 Resolver endpoints also enable DNS resolution between Outposts and on-premises DNS servers.
AWS Outposts Rack is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools on-premises. While Amazon Route 53 is a service for managing DNS names and answering DNS queries. The Amazon Route 53 Resolver (earlier called Amazon DNS server) responds recursively to DNS queries from AWS resources for public records, Amazon VPC-specific DNS names, and Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones and is available by default in all Virtual Private Clouds (VPC).
With the availability of Amazon Route 53 Resolver on AWS Outposts rack, the company is providing a solution that can improve on-premises applications availability and performance since earlier, applications and services running on an Outpost forwarded their DNS queries to the parent AWS Region the Outpost is connected to. This could lead to temporary site disconnections due to weather events or fiber cuts, which subsequently leads to local DNS resolution fails.
When opting for local Route 53 Resolvers, the company states, "applications and services will continue to benefit from local DNS resolution to discover other services—even in a parent AWS Region connectivity loss event."
Furthermore, Sébastien Stormacq, a principal developer advocate at AWS, explains in an AWS news blog post:
Local Resolvers also help to reduce latency for DNS resolutions as query results are cached and served locally from the Outposts, eliminating unnecessary round-trips to the parent AWS Region. All the DNS resolutions for applications in Outposts VPCs using private DNS are served locally.
The local Route 53 Resolver endpoints are part of the launch of the availability of Amazon Route 53 Resolver on the AWS Outposts rack, providing cloud network administrators with the capability to establish endpoints within the VPC on Outposts.
With Route 53 Resolver outbound endpoints, cloud network administrators can direct DNS queries from Route 53 Resolvers to DNS resolvers under their management, such as those on their on-premises network. On the other hand, Route 53 Resolver inbound endpoints forward DNS queries received from outside the VPC to the Resolver running on Outposts. This feature facilitates sending DNS queries for services deployed on a private Outposts VPC from external sources beyond that VPC.
Screenshot of the Create Route 53 resolver in the AWS Management Console (Source: AWS News blog post)
Another public cloud provider Microsoft offers similar services to AWS Outpost Rack. For instance, the Azure Stack family offers Azure Stack Hub, which provides a subset of Azure services that can run locally, allowing organizations to build and deploy applications like they would on the public Azure cloud. It includes an integration with DNS.
To start with Amazon Route 53 Resolver on AWS Outposts, the company recommends that customers enable Route 53 Resolver when ordering a new Outpost or work with them to add Route 53 Resolver to an existing Outpost. Furthermore, they can create and manage the Route 53 Resolver on Outposts using Route 53 APIs, the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs.
Lastly, users can configure local Resolvers and endpoints in all AWS Regions where Outposts racks are available, except in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Furthermore, the local Resolvers are provided without additional cost, and the endpoints are charged per elastic network interface (ENI) per hour. And finally, the pricing details of the Outposts rack are available on the pricing page.
