Amazon Route 53 alias records provide a Route 53–specific extension to DNS functionality. Instead of an IP address or a domain name, an alias record contains a pointer to a CloudFront distribution, an Elastic Beanstalk environment, an ELB Classic Load Balancer, an Application Load Balancer, or a Network Load Balancer. For the zone apex (e.g., example.com), you must use an Alias record because DNS standards do not allow CNAME records at the zone apex. Even for subdomains, Alias records are preferred for AWS resources as they automatically update if the resource's IP changes and they are free of charge for queries to certain AWS resources.