AWS has taken steps to boost resilience weeks after a major outage, rolling out a business continuity feature targeting DNS records.
Last month, an outage at the hyperscaler knocked an array of popular services offline – from Signal and Slack to Zoom and even Amazon itself – taking several hours to fully resolve.
The outage stemmed from DNS resolution issues and took place in what AWS calls US-EAST-1 Region, better known as northern Virginia, where plenty of massive data centers are located.
A month on, AWS has announced a new tool to help mitigate future incidents, helping to get systems back online within an hour after DNS issues, specifically in that often troublesome US-EAST-1 Region.
"Today, we’re announcing Amazon Route 53 Accelerated recovery for managing public DNS records, a new Domain Name Service (DNS) business continuity feature that is designed to provide a 60-minute recovery time objective (RTO) during service disruptions in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region," said Micah Walter, senior solutions architect, in a post on the AWS blog.
"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."
AWS touts new tools
Walter explained that the tool targets DNS changes that customers can make within 60 minutes of a service disruption in that region.
"Customers running applications that require business continuity have told us they need additional DNS resilience capabilities to meet their business continuity requirements and regulatory compliance obligations," he said.
When services are disrupted, the new tool offers several benefits. "The feature maintains access to essential Route 53 API operations, ensuring that DNS management remains available when it’s needed most," Walter added.
"Organizations can continue to make critical DNS changes, provision new infrastructure, and redirect traffic flows without waiting for full service restoration."
However, the company also stressed that wasn't a sign of an issue at AWS, but pinned the need for the tool on demand from customers in sensitive industries.
"While AWS maintains exceptional availability across our global infrastructure, organizations in regulated industries like banking, FinTech, and SaaS 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," Walter noted.
How the new tools work
The system works with existing setups and customers can continue using their existing Route 53 API endpoint without changes to apps or scripts.
"The implementation is designed for simplicity and reliability,” he said. This means customers won’t need to “learn new APIs or modify existing automation scripts”.
"The same Route 53 endpoints and API calls continue to work, providing a seamless experience during both normal operations and failover scenarios."
In the post, AWS noted that accelerated recovery isn't enabled by default, but switching it on for a new or existing hosted zone simply involves switching it on.
"You can enable this feature through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS Software Development Kit (AWS SDKs), or infrastructure as code tools like AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)," he said.
Accelerated recovery is available now for Amazon Route 53 public hosted zones and is free.
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