Route53 is DNS management service by AWS. DNS is absolutely not a database, and yet here’s Nicholas Martin writing up some very clever trickery originally done by Corey Quinn:
When you think about it, DNS configuration is actually a very rudimentary NoSQL database. You can view and modify it at any time quite easily through your domain provider’s website, and you can view each “record” just like a row in a database table.
Many services use DNS TXT records to verify domain ownership. You would essentially add or modify a TXT record to store a key/value pair, which the service will then query.
Why? It’s super fast and costs $0.50 + $0.40 per million queries.
There are even libraries (ten34, diggydb) to help do it. I wouldn’t do it just because I’d be scared Amazon wouldn’t like it and cut it off. Plus, ya know, there isn’t exactly auth.
