Hybrid Cloud DNS Options for Amazon VPC

Publication date: December 02, 2022 (Document revisions)

Abstract

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a foundational element of the internet that underpins many services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Route 53 Resolver provides resolution with DNS for public domain names, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), and Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones (PHZs).

This whitepaper includes solutions and considerations for advanced DNS architectures to help customers who have workloads with unique DNS requirements, or on-premises resources that require DNS resolution between on-premises data centers and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in Amazon VPCs.

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Introduction

Many organizations have both on-premises resources and resources in the cloud. DNS name resolution is essential for on-premises and cloud-based resources. For customers with hybrid workloads, which include both on-premises and cloud-based resources, extra steps are necessary to configure DNS to work seamlessly across both environments.

AWS services that require name resolution could include Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon EC2.

Route 53 Resolver, which is available in all Amazon VPCs, responds to DNS queries for public records, Amazon VPC resources, and Route 53 PHZs.

You can configure Route 53 Resolver to forward queries to customer-managed authoritative DNS servers hosted on-premises, and to respond to DNS queries that your on-premises DNS servers forward to your Amazon VPC.

This whitepaper illustrates several different architectures that you can implement on AWS using native and custom-built solutions. These architectures meet the need for name resolution of on-premises infrastructure from your Amazon VPC, and address constraints that have only been partially addressed by previously published solutions.