Amazon Route 53 Introduces DNS failover (opens in new tab)

Route 53 is becoming a viable alternative to enterprise providers UltraDNS and Dyn. Performance is solid, but features have been lacking. This is a popular feature those providers charge $100+/mo for versus $0.75/mo on Route 53. Monitoring capabilities are limited (tcp and basic http only), but for many this is probably sufficient. DNSSEC is another feature I hope they will support in the future.

A few months back I wrote a blog post on the topic of managed DNS provider comparisons (performance, market share, price, features, network size, etc.):

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis...

Route 53 is slow ( For a paid solution ). At least when i tested it. It you are doing to use a Third Party DNS that you paid you are either going with the best ones or ones that are good enough like OnApp Anycast DNS.

isn't this offering cannibalizing AWS load balancers? if I have a set of web servers with a load balancer at front and health checks that takes unhealthy nodes out of rotation, isn't it cheaper now to just use this DNS fail-over?

http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/elasticloadbalancing/ http://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/

We use DNS Made Easy but and are happy with them. However, for our level of DNS queries per month - e.g. over 50million Route 53 would give us some significant cost savings.

Do you guys know whether Route 53 offers templating mechanism? e.g. setup 1 template and apply to 50 different domains?

Does this feature use EBS to store the state?

noob question - why use load balancing if DNS failover does essentially the same thing?

More details can be found in my blog post at http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/02/create-a-backup-website-u... .

Would be nice to have the ability to set up some type of alert/notification.