[dns-operations] FYI - Amazon/AWS enters the DNS business

[Jeff Schmidt]

FYI... this went out today...

Jeff

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Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We're excited to introduce today a highly available and scalable Domain Name
System (DNS) service - Amazon Route 53. It is designed to give developers
and businesses a reliable and cost effective way to route end users to
Internet applications by translating human readable names like
www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers
use to connect to each other. Route 53 effectively connects user requests to
infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) -- such as an Amazon
Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, an Amazon Elastic Load
Balancer, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket -- and can
also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.

A reliable, cloud-based DNS service has been one of the most requested
offerings by our customers. With Route 53, you can create a "hosted zone" to
add DNS records for a new domain or transfer DNS records for a domain you
currently own. Route 53 is also designed to work well with other AWS
offerings, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). By using AWS
IAM with Route 53, you can control who in your organization can make changes
to your DNS records. In the future, we plan to add additional integration
features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load
Balancer instances to a DNS name, and the ability to route your customers to
the closest EC2 region.

Route 53 is also designed to be fast and simple. It uses a global network of
DNS servers to respond to end users with low latency and has an easy-to-use,
self-service API. There are no long-term contracts or minimum usage
commitments for using Route 53 - you pay $1.00 per month for the hosted
zones you manage, $0.50 per million queries for the first billion queries,
and $0.25 per million queries above a billion. To learn more about Amazon
Route 53 visit the Amazon Route 53 detail page or the Getting Started Guide.


Sincerely, 
The Amazon Web Services Team