Amazon Route 53 is a new service from Amazon that manages DNS names and answers DNS queries.
The two things I feel are most valuable are:
Very fast update propagation times: One of the difficulties with many of the existing DNS services are the very long update propagation times, sometimes it may even take up to 24 hours before updates are received at all replicas. Modern systems require much faster update propagation to for example deal with outages. We have designed Route 53 to propagate updates very quickly and give the customer the tools to find out when all changes have been propagated.
Low-latency query resolution The query resolution functionality of Route 53 is based on anycast, which will route the request automatically to the DNS server that is the closest. This achieves very low-latency for queries which is crucial for the overall performance of internet applications. Anycast is also very robust in the presence of network or server failures as requests are automatically routed to the next closest server.
Fun Fact: “Route 53″ is a play on the fact that DNS servers respond to queries on port 53. If you want to learn more about Route 53 visit http://aws.amazon.com/route53 and read the blog post at the AWS Developer weblog.
Thanks to All Things Distributed for the pointer.