Route 53 application recovery controller is a set of capabilities that continuously monitors an application’s ability to recover from failures and controls application recovery across multiple availability zones, regions, and possibly your own data center environments. 

You can define a readiness check to monitor AWS resource configurations, capacity, and network routing policies. They can check the configuration of Auto Scaling Groups, Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, RDS instances, and DynamoDB tables among others.  

These readiness checks ensure that the recovery environment is scaled and configured to take over when needed. You can check AWS service limits to verify that enough capacity can be deployed.   You can also verify that capacity and scaling setups for applications are exactly the same across regions before a failover takes place. 

Readiness Checks work with Routing Controls to give you a way to failover an entire application based on custom conditions like application metrics, partial failures, increased error rates, or latency. You can also failover manually.   With Routing Controls you can shift traffic for maintenance purposes or during a real failure scenario. You can also apply safety rules to routing controls as a way to prevent a failover to an unprepared replica.  

A control panel is a group of routing controls for an application. As mentioned earlier, A routing control is used to turn traffic flow ON or OFF to individual cells in Regions or Availability Zones.  

This will permit you to define custom traffic re-direction for your applications during failover or maintenance cycles.  Amazon Route 53 Application recovery controller allows you to configure fine-grain failover and verification steps to implement applications requiring very high availability.  

This concludes our introduction to Amazon Route 53.