When you’re connecting with a web page, you enter a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) into the browser to reach a certain internet location. This is how you identify it on your device’s web browser. You don’t want to end up on the wrong website.
How do your users get to your website once they type in a URL using some catchy, easy-to-remember words that relate to the website they want to reach? To them, it’s a simple mouse click. On the backend, it’s a completely different story.
The URL is also known as a site’s domain name. Typing it into a browser is like dialing a telephone number. Each domain name is linked with a numerical address, known as the IP address (e.g. 99.86.33.31 is the IP address for AWS.com). Using the domain name saves you the hassle of remembering this lengthy number every time you want to reach a website.
Once the user clicks their mouse to launch the URL, it then has to be converted into an IP address, a step that’s transparent to the user. The IP address allows computers to connect to each other, but a whole lot of work goes on in those milliseconds between typing in the URL and the final connection.
How does this work? In an AWS cloud environment, the answer is easy: Amazon Route 53. Let’s dive deeper into this valuable service in this latest chapter of AWS 101 in the same way we have looked at using Amazon S3 and EC2 and other key AWS services in our previous blogs.
What is Amazon Route 53?
Amazon Route 53 simplifies the way cloud architecture routes users to Internet applications. As was mentioned previously when we discussed DNS, the Route 53 service translates the URL names, such as www.onixnet.com into the corresponding numeric IP address, which looks like 65.49.39.13.
