Amazon has announced a new authoritative DNS service – Route 53.

Sign up is straightforward – click a few buttons on aws.amazon.com, and a few moments later, you’ll have an email confirming your access to the service. If you dig into the Getting Started Guide, you’ll note that “Part of the sign-up procedure involves receiving a phone call and entering a PIN using the phone keypad,” however, that wasn’t necessary for me. Perhaps it’s only for new AWS accounts?

There is no user interface in the AWS Console although there are indications one is on its way. The Route 53 developer tools are fairly bare-bones at this point – four Perl scripts. Those scripts require relatively uncommon Perl modules, not included in the default Ubuntu (Lucid) repositories, although they are available through CPAN.

However, the third-party Boto Python interface to Amazon Web Services already includes support, and presumably other tools are also rapidly adding support, if they don’t have it already.

Using the Perl tools, I created a zone for an example domain – gearlister.org – and was given four name servers:

ns-1945.awsdns-51.co.uk (205.251.199.153)
ns-39.awsdns-04.com (205.251.192.39)
ns-690.awsdns-22.net (205.251.194.178)
ns-1344.awsdns-40.org (205.251.197.64)

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