1.
Amazon Route 53
Improve your availability and
application performance at lower
cost with Amazon Route 53
Alex Corley, Senior Solutions Architect, AWS

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
What is Amazon Route 53?
Amazon Route 53 is AWS’s authoritative Domain
Name System service.
DNS is a Tier-0 service – availability is most
important.
No pre-warm up required – handles unpredictable
traffic.
Pay as you go pricing – only pay for the resources
you use.

3.
© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Use Case:
State of Arizona
The State of Arizona consists of more than 130 federated government agencies and 32,000
employees, which serve more than 6 million residents.
Prior to considering a migration to AWS, they ran their infrastructure on premises.
• They had over 2,600 servers – 53% of which were older than 5 years.
• They had 1 central DNS server with 300 different zones, and over 6,000 records.
All applications and all traffic routed through a single central server.
They began looking at Amazon Route 53 after experiencing a failure of their DNS server, and
with no backup, they were out of service until the issue was resolved.
By using Amazon Route 53, the State now saves 75% in annual operating costs on its DNS
solution when compared to previous on-premises IT infrastructure.

4.
© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Use Case:
Newsweek
Newsweek previously had their DNS managed through a co-location, and knew that migrating would
reduce their operating expenses significantly.
Newsweek initially began looking at AWS in 2009 as they were looking for cost-saving opportunities.
Decided on AWS due to its comprehensive list of services that met their demands.
They adopted Amazon Route 53 for DNS management and saw savings of 93%.
“We were able to reduce our DNS costs by ninety-three percent, which in tandem allowed us to shorten
our time-to-live (TTLs) for easier, timelier management of DNS records. In the cloud, IP addresses are
largely ephemeral, so we needed a service that would allow us to increase the amount of DNS requests
due to a shorter TTL without increasing our spend.”
- Nathan Butler, Newsweek

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
How it Works
Users
DNS
Resolver Amazon
Route 53
Where is
www.example.com?
I don’t know –
I’ll ask the
authority
1.2.3.4 1.2.3.4
53
DNS translates domain names into IP addresses to route
traffic to websites.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Use Case:
NASA JPL
Mars Curiosity Rover
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used AWS to stream the images and video associated
with Curiosity’s landing.
Using cloud computing enabled JPL to provision capacity rapidly and leverage the AWS
cloud to deliver successfully engaging experiences of Mars to the public.
They used Amazon Route 53 Weighted Round Robin to provide a weighted traffic
distribution across ELBs
They used Amazon Route 53 for both live video streaming and for overall web architecture.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Amazon Route 53 Design Principles
Reliable
Fast
Integrated
with AWS
Easy to Use
Cost
Effective
Flexible
• Redundant locations
• Backed with SLA
• Worldwide Anycast network
• Fast propagation of changes
• ELB-Alias Queries
• Latency Based Routing
• More to come
• Console
• Programmatic API
• Domain name management
• Inexpensive rates
• Pay as you go model
• Geo DNS
• Weighted Round Robin
• Self-Aliasing

8.
© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Amazon Route 53’s Key Features
High
Availability
DNS
Health Checks
and Failover
Domain Name
Registration
Advanced
Routing: Geo
DNS, LBR, and
WRR
Alias Records
to AWS
Resources
Private DNS

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
High Availability DNS
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS web service.
Designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective
way to route end users to Internet applications.
Amazon Route 53 can handle spikes in traffic volume without requiring any warming
up of servers.
Use advanced routing policies along with health checks and failovers to ensure your
application is always available to end users, and provides the best experience.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Use Case:
WOW air
WOW air is an Icelandic low-cost airline.
WOW air uses Amazon Route 53 to direct users coming from its 135 domains to the appropriate web
services.
WOW air regularly deploys new servers, and in the past would have to set it up from scratch, in some
cases taking them days. Today the entire process of launching servers and creating new records that point
to those servers takes them under 10 minutes.
One of the biggest benefits they’ve seen is the ability to increase their IT infrastructure without absorbing
any of the up-front costs.
“Since going live in AWS, we’ve increased our IT infrastructure by around 40 percent. The only way we could have
achieved that in the old environment would have been investing in hardware, which takes several years to pay off.
As our VMware hosts were getting old, we also saw the long-term benefits in migrating to the cloud rather than
reinvesting in hardware and renewing software licenses.”
By avoiding licensing and hardware costs Thorvaldsson estimates that WOW air has saved between
$30,000 and $45,000.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
Health Checks
Amazon Route 53 health checks monitor the health and performance of your web
applications, web servers, and other resources to help detect outages or problems with
your websites or applications.
• You can configure health checks for various resources such as EC2 instances, RDS instances,
S3 buckets, as well as other AWS resources.
• You can also configure health checks for non-AWS resources and endpoints.
When creating a health check, you will be able to specify the interval at which you want
Amazon Route 53 to send automated requests over the Internet to your application, or
other resources to verify that it’s reachable, available and functional.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
Health Checks
Once enabled, Health Check agents will monitor each end-point of your application to
determine its availability, returning a status of “healthy” or “unhealthy.
Health Checks can be used to simulate requests similar to those made by end users.
You can configure a CloudWatch alarm for each health check to receive a notification
when a resource is determined to be unhealthy.
If a failover is configured, and the agents determine the endpoint to be unhealthy,
Amazon Route 53 will redirect your end users to pre-determined alternate end-points
that are functioning properly.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
Health Checks
Two new health check features launched September 2015:
Calculated Health Checks let you combine the results of multiple Amazon Route 53 health checks
into a single value using common operations such as AND, OR, and NOT.
• You can use calculated health checks with Amazon Route 53’s DNS failover to help improve the availability of your
entire application.
• Like Amazon Route 53’s other health check varieties, calculated health checks are integrated with Amazon
CloudWatch to provide metrics, graphs, and configurable alarms.
Latency Measurement Health Checks let you measure the performance of your application in
addition to its availability.
• When you enable this optional feature, Amazon Route 53 provides additional Amazon CloudWatch metrics for
connection time and response latency from each of the AWS regions where Amazon Route 53 conducts health checks.
• You can configure alarms on these Amazon CloudWatch metrics in order to be notified if your application becomes
slow to respond to customer requests.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
DNS Failover
You can configure a failover record that is tied to your health check.
If the health check returns a status of healthy, your application will continue to function as
usual, but if the health check returns a status of unhealthy, then Amazon Route 53 will stop
returning the value of the unhealthy endpoint, and begin responding to queries with the value
of the failover record.
Utilizing failover records helps ensure that you only return answers for resources that are
healthy and reachable from the outside world, by routing your end users away from failed or
unhealthy parts of your application.
Failing over to a healthy endpoint ensures minimal downtime for your website or application.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
Benefits of DNS Failover
Can improve the availability of your applications running on AWS.
Allows you to configure backup and failover scenarios for your own applications.
Enables highly available multi-region architectures on AWS
Helps add redundancy to your application and maintain high availability for your end
users.
Enables customers to run primary applications simultaneously in multiple AWS regions,
with Amazon Route 53 automatically removing from service any region where your
application is unavailable.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
Simple Failover Configuration
Amazon
Route 53
Web App
Server
Data
Volume
Database
Server
Primary
(Active)
Secondary
(Inactive)
Health Check
= Healthy

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
Simple Failover Configuration
Amazon
Route 53
Web App
Server
Data
Volume
Database
Server
Primary
(Inactive)
Secondary
(Active)
Health Check
= Unhealthy

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Use Case:
Loggly
Loggly provides its customers with a cloud-based
logging-as-a-service platform that indexes customer log
data to help identify issues in real time, pinpoint root
causes, and resolve problems quickly.
To take advantage of flexibility and scalability, Loggly
built their distributed architecture on AWS.
Loggly’s customers are primarily cloud based, which
means they are typically logging more.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Use Case:
Loggly
Loggly has a total of 5 Hosted Zones with 600+ Record Sets, and
30+ health checks across the board.
They use cli53 and the AWS Console to manage their Record Sets.
Loggly utilizes Simple Round Robin for collectors.
Each Record Set has health checks for HTTP, TCP, etc. CollectorCollector Collector
Loggly Pipeline

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
CollectorCollector Collector
Use Case:
Loggly
Loggly uses Health Checks to detect collectors out of
service.
Once a collector is detected as being unhealthy or out
of service, a notification fires and a new collector gets
added.
The previous elastic IP gets assigned to the new
collector.
During this process, Loggly suffers no downtime or
performance degradation.
Collector
Loggly Pipeline
Collector

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
Advanced Routing Policies
Simple Routing: With simple routing, Amazon Route 53 responds to DNS queries based only on the
values in the resource record set (i.e., the IP).
Use a simple routing policy when you have a single resource that performs a given function for your
domain.
Amazon Route 53 also supports complex routing policies, including:
• Weighted Round Robin Routing
• Latency Based Routing
• Geolocation Routing

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Advanced Routing Policies
Weighted Round Robin Routing
Weighted resource record sets allow you to associate multiple records with a single DNS name.
• Use the weighted routing policy when you have multiple resources that perform the same function, and you want
Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to those resources in proportions that you specify. For example, sending 40% of
queries to one server, and 60% to the other.
The probability of any one resource record set being selected depends on its weight as a proportion of
the total weight for all resource record sets in the group.
Can be useful for a variety of purposes, including load balancing and testing new versions of software.
Weight for a given resource record set
Sum of the weights for the resource record sets

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Advanced Routing Policies
Latency Based Routing
Latency Based Routing enables you to run multiple stacks of your application in different EC2
regions around the world.
Use latency based routing when you have resources in multiple EC2 data centers that perform the same function
and you want Amazon Route 53 to respond to DNS queries with the resources that provide the lowest network
latency.
Amazon Route 53 will route end users to the end-point that provides the lowest latency.
Latency between hosts on the Internet can change over time as a result of changes in network
connectivity and routing. Latency-based routing is based on latency measurements performed
over a period of time, and the measurements reflect these changes.
Supported endpoints: EC2 instances (with or without an Elastic IP), or ELBs used for EC2
instances.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Advanced Routing Policies
Geolocation Routing
Geolocation Routing directs requests to specific endpoints based on the geographic location from
which the request originates.
• Use geolocation routing when you want Amazon Route 53 to respond to DNS queries based on the location of
your users.
Enables you to customize localized content or restrict distribution of content to only the markets you
have licensed, or select to distribute to.
There are three levels of geographic granularity: continent, country, and state.
Distribution of requests is more predictable and consistent than LBR.
Geo DNS can be combined with LBR or DNS Failover for a variety of low-latency and fault-tolerant
architectures.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Geographical Reach
Edge Network as of Q3 2015
North America South America Europe Asia/Pacific
Ashburn, VA
Atlanta, GA
Dallas, TX
Hayward, CA
Jacksonville, FL
Los Angeles, CA
Miami, FL
Newark, NJ
New York, NY
Palo Alto, CA
San Jose, CA
Seattle, WA
South Bend, IN
St. Louis, MO
Rio De Janeiro
Sao Paulo
Amsterdam
Dublin
Frankfurt
London
Madrid
Marseille
Milan
Paris
Stockholm
Warsaw
Chennai
Hong Kong
Manila
Melbourne
Mumbai
Osaka
Seoul
Sydney
Singapore
Taipei
Tokyo

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
Domain Name Registration
Registering Domains Using Amazon Route 53
• Use Amazon Route 53 to search for a new domain you are interested in registering.
• Amazon Route 53 supports a large number of TLDs, including both generic TLDs, and Geographic Domains.
• When you register a domain, Amazon Route 53 will automatically create the hosted zone for your domain.
Transferring Domains to Amazon Route 53
• You can transfer domain registration from another registrar, for supported TLDs, to Amazon Route 53 or from
one AWS account to another.
• Transferring your domains into Route 53 allows you to manage all of your domains in the same place as your
name servers and hosted zones.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
Private DNS
Use Amazon Route 53 to manage custom DNS names for resources internal to a VPC, such
as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and ElastiCache nodes.
Private DNS prevents these names and your network topology from being exposed to the
public Internet.
You can also use Amazon Route 53 to configure split-view DNS, also known as split-horizon
DNS.
Split Horizon DNS enables you to maintain both internal and external versions of the same
website or application by configuring public and private hosted zones to return different
internal and external IP addresses for the same domain name.
Useful for testing changes before making them public.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Key Features:
Alias Records to AWS Resources
Amazon Route 53 enables customers to use Alias records to point to other AWS resources.
• Use alias records to point to an ELB load balancer, an Amazon S3 bucket that is configured as a static
website, an alternate domain name for a CloudFront distribution, or another Amazon Route 53 resource
record set in the same hosted zone
Alias records save time as changes to the endpoint the record is pointing to are automatically recognized.
• For example, a customer has an alias record pointing to an ELB load balancer. If the IP address of the load
balancer changes, Amazon Route 53 will automatically reflect those changes without any changes to the
hosted zone that contains the record sets.
Queries to Alias records that are mapped to Elastic Load Balancers, Amazon CloudFront
distributions, and Amazon S3 website buckets are free.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Use Case:
Outback Steakhouse
Outback Steakhouse was in the process of designing a national
digital marketing campaign, in collaboration with Engauge, using
several AWS products in the process.
Utilized Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to an Elastic Load
Balancer.
Using AWS, they were able to meet aggressive timelines and
deployed an enterprise solution in weeks.
They were able to utilize various AWS services to meet all of
their needs.
Utilized Amazon Premium Support to tap into the AWS
Solution Architects and connected with service teams to
optimize their application.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Use Case:
Outback Steakhouse
“With a heavy load of over 250,000 requests a minute in our 'flash' campaign, Amazon Web
Services made sure our website was always available. Without AWS, it would have taken us
2 months to set up and configure our servers and infrastructure for a campaign that would last
only 1 week. With the AWS Cloud, we were able to save 90% over using our old, on-premises
design.“
- Raghu Kakarala, CTO of Engauge.

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© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Host multiple domains on the same set of four Amazon Route 53 name servers.
Enables “white label” name server names (e.g. ns1.example.com) pointing to Amazon Route 53
name servers.
Key Features:
Reusable Delegation Sets
Enables auditing of all API calls and modifications to a customer’s Amazon Route 53 resources,
including hosted zones, DNS records, health checks, and domain names.
Integration with AWS CloudTrail

32.
© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Mar
14
Apr
14
May
14
Jun
14
Jul
14
Aug
14
Sep
14
Oct
14
Jan
15
Nov
14
Dec
14
Feb
15
Pace of Innovation
Mar
15
Apr
15
• Seoul, Korea edge location
• Editable hosted zone
comments
• AWS CloudTrail Integration
• Tagging for hosted zones and domains
• Health Check Status Column and One-
Click Alarms
• Private DNS within VPC
• Health Check Failure Reasons
• Reusable delegation sets
• Geo DNS
• Domain Name Registration
• Lower pricing on DNS queries
• Melbourne, Australia edge location
• Editable health checks
• Tagging for health checks
• AWS Mobile App support for Amazon
Route 53
• Domain Name Based Health Checks
Feb
14
• Fast Interval Health Checks
• Configurable Failover Thresholds
May
15
Jun
15
Jul
15
Aug
15
• Calculated Health Checks
• Latency Measurement Health
Checks
Sep
15

33.
© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Pay-as-you-go Pricing*
Hosted Zones
• First 25 Hosted Zones - $0.50 per HZ / month
• For additional Hosted Zones - $0.10 per HZ / month
Standard Queries
• First 1 Billion queries - $0.40 per million queries / month
• Over 1 Billion queries - $0.20 per million queries / month
Queries to Alias records that are mapped to Elastic
Load Balancers, Amazon CloudFront distributions,
and Amazon S3 website buckets are free.
* Price as of 9.14.15
Latency Based Routing Queries
• First 1 Billion queries - $0.60 per million queries / month
• Over 1 Billion queries - $0.30 per million queries / month
Geo DNS Queries
• First 1 Billion queries - $0.70 per million queries / month
• Over 1 Billion queries - $0.35 per million queries / month

34.
© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Health Check Pricing*
New and existing customers receive health checks of up to 50 AWS endpoints that are within or linked
to the same AWS account for free.
Basic Health Checks
• AWS Endpoints - $0.50 per health check / month
• Non-AWS Endpoints - $0.75 per health check / month
Advanced Health Check Options
• AWS Endpoints - $1 / month per optional feature
• Non-AWS Endpoints - $2 / month per optional feature
* Price as of 9.14.15

35.
© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
How To Get Started
Sergey Royt, Senior Software Development Engineer, AWS

36.
© 2011 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Q&A