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by ttul 2800 days ago
Amazon also limits DNS queries - probably in a well meaning attempt to prevent DNS amplification attacks from originating within AWS. And I mean DNS queries across their network whether or not they hit Amazon's DNS servers. This is _any_ port 53 UDP traffic.

https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/undocumented-limit-dns-aws/

2 comments

I have got hit by this several time :(. AWS actually have well document about this DNS issue: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-dns.htm...

This issue can easily get amplifier if you're using Kubernetes on AWS and some library that didn't cache on DNS on its own. Imagine you have a healthcheck every 3 seconds, do a bunch of DNS to its dependencies services, and a single server may have 10 pods.

I wonder if this is related to connection tracking?
By default, Amazon uses stateless firewall. It means that by default it's not tracking connections.
I think you may be mistaken. Security Groups are stateful: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/VPC_Securit...

As suggested, it's very likely they hit the connection tracking limitation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-ne...

I've personally witnessed teams hit this specifically for DNS (usually for internal, where you have explicitly permitted src/dst).

Yep I mistaken Security groups with Network Acl. Thanks. It's in the best practices to not track dns for big systems.

From powerdns https://doc.powerdns.com/recursor/performance.html

Thx for the clarification. Had the same misconception