AWS has released a new DNS business continuity feature designed to ensure customers can change DNS records even if US-EAST-1 falls over.

“Amazon Route 53 Accelerated Recovery” is free but not enabled by default –  customers will need to proactively enable it in their console/CLI etc. 

It is “designed to provide a 60-minute recovery time objective (RTO)” for customers suffering issues in the wake of any US-EAST-1 outages.

A copy of your zone in Oregon…

It effectively does something simple: maintains a copy of your public hosted zone in US West (Oregon), the service’s documentation shows. 

“If services in the US East (N. Virginia) Region become unavailable for an extended period, Route 53 will execute failover within 60 minutes, automatically redirecting control plane operations [to US-West.]

“You can then continue to make DNS changes programmatically via the CLI, SDK, and API” Amazon said, cautioning that only a “limited set of API methods will be available during failover.” (Just 13 requests will function.)

Amazon said the release comes after customers demanded “additional DNS resilience capabilities” – US-EAST-1 suffered a major incident on October 19-20 that AWS blamed on a “latent defect” in its DNS management system. 

AWS senior solutions architect Micah Walter told customers today that regulated industries “want the confidence that they will be able to make DNS changes even during unexpected regional disruptions, allowing them to quickly provision standby cloud resources or redirect traffic when needed.”

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