Route 53 DNS Health Check Possible?

Question

I'm in the process of creating a Route 53 DNS failover to direct traffic to two EC2 zones. Obviously, if one fails, I'd like R53 to direct traffic to the other region.

Each region has a ELB with some instances being distributed. What is the best way for me to configure the R53 health check? Ideally, I'd like to use the DNS record the ELB is assigned to since Amazon may change the IP.

However this doesn't seem possible. In the R53 Health Check option, I select the following:

Protocol: HTTP
IP: ip_address
port: 8080
HostName: ELB_Host_name.amazonaws.com
Path: /index.html

When I use this, the URL will still show the IP address instead of the DNS name. Is this their only option? I don't want to resolve the ELB DNS entry and put the IP in there. This would fail if Amazon decides to switch something.

Answer 1

Route 53 natively supports ELB with an internal health check. Turn "Evaluate target health" on and "Associate with Health Check" off and R53 will use the ELB's internal health check.

When setting up DNS Failover for an ELB Endpoint, you simply set “Evaluate Target Health” to true—you don’t create a health check of your own for this endpoint. -- AWS blog