AWS Route 53 DNS service reimagined...as a file system?

offbeat

Cloud industry pros have a bit of fun at Amazon's expense

For years, Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at Duckbill and occasional Reg columnist, has argued that Amazon's Route 53 DNS service is a database.

While literally true in the sense that DNS records are stored key-value pairs, it's more of a provocation than an endorsement. Even so, the idea has inspired prior jibes.

In that spirit, Colin Percival, the creator of backup service Tarsnap, has released Route 53 Files, "a new file system that seamlessly connects any AWS compute resource with Amazon's highest-availability database."

"The opening line of referring to Route 53 as Amazon's highest-availability database was partly a hat-tip to Corey," Percival told The Register. "Everyone in the field knows it's true, though."

But Percival's satirical target isn't really AWS database downtime. He's more focused on Amazon S3 Files, a file system that links AWS compute resources with Amazon Simple Storage Service.

"S3 Files launched in April and my reaction was, 'Oh, we're shipping category errors now? Hold my beer,'" explained Percival.

"I'm not saying that Route 53 Files can't be useful – as Corey notes, the API for Route 53 is awful – but the inspiration was 'this needs to be satirized' and the launch post was written with that in mind."

The launch post was penned in the style of the S3 Files launch post. Percival pointed to one particular passage about Route 53 Files being "ideal for shared workloads that mutate authoritative DNS, such as AI agents collaborating through file-based tools and on-call engineers reverting each other's changes using sed."

That passage, he said, echoes wording from the AWS post pitching S3 Files as being "ideal for interactive, shared workloads that mutate data, from agentic AI agents collaborating through file-based tools to ML training pipelines processing datasets."

Percival said he understands that many AWS customers love S3 Files. "But the fact customers ask for faster horses doesn't in itself mean that's what we should give them; the weird edge cases which come up when you ship category errors can cause unexpected problems and I'm not convinced that customers understand them sufficiently," he said.

Percival said he isn't aware of anyone using S3 Files in production. 

"I'm just looking at the design and saying, 'that looks like a sharp edge which will hurt someone.'  Two examples which come to mind are the 'Sync back to S3 after 60 seconds of inactivity,' which I'm sure will bite someone eventually when they end up waiting for changes which never arrive because a file is being continuously updated; and the IAM integration, which (due to the security fail which is IMDS) gives people far less privilege separation than they might expect from a filesystem."

Quinn expressed appreciation for Percival's work.

"I've been calling Route53 a database for the better part of a decade mostly to annoy people who know what a database is," Quinn told The Register. "Colin took the amazing bones of a legendary service and gave it an interface model that isn't molten garbage, and I am totally here for it. He replaced the API with echo which is a downgrade in every respect except for the part where it works without requiring six weeks of cloud school."

And the funny thing is that it actually works. ®