So I am just 1 week into this DNS service which is not long, but wow. WOW. Okay so I didnt have a great background with lots of other DNS providers, I ususally just used whatever godaddy or google domains gave me. I had NO IDEA how much speed I was loosing out on. Now onto some techs:
Route 53 works outside of EC2 nodes. So you DO NOT need to run servers with AWS to use Route53. I dont.
Geo IP routing. I can specify an A record for every location that I am servicing. The offer nice granularity in the US. I can do state by state and I have. The rest of the globe I can set records for on a continent basis and have then hit my NETH server.
Yes that is 50 A records, however based on the query location it really just appears like 1.
Health checks. I can monitor for every single one of these geoIP route locations. Ususally I set them up and check each for about 1 hour then check the next region. I leave some in major areas running at all times.
Latency routing with aliases. Geo got ya down? How about serving the faster of the 2? The allow for AWS region latency routes also in the 3 US regions they serve. Im sure that there is more cool, but thats all I know of for now.