Amazon Route 53 Introduces DNS failover

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...

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

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?

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

Does this feature use EBS to store the state?

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

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.