I have a domain name configured into GoDaddy domain provider.
I created Angular application accessible using this cloudfront internal web address:
xxxxxxxxx.cloudfront.net
The question is how to configure the domain to redirect properly web requests to this address hosted on AWS. I contacted the GoDaddy support and they gave these instructions:
In order to make changes we need the nameservers and the nameservers will be provided by the host that is aws
Once you have the nameservers, Please open the dns page
You will see 2 nameservers that are for godaddy
Click on change option and then select I will use my own nameservers and then update the nameservers that will be provided.
Where I can see what are the names servers used in AWS Cloudfront?
You need to setup the domain in Route53 first (eg example.com), as part of the setup you get 4 name server addresses. You change the name servers at GoDaddy to your AWS nameservers as their support describe, which authorises Route53 to host your DNS. From then on you manage your DNS from Route53, not GoDaddy (but GoDaddy are still your registrar).
Once your nameservers point to route53 follow the docs on creating an alias in route53
If you want to use your own domain name, use Amazon Route 53 to create
an alias record that points to your CloudFront distribution. An alias
record is a Route 53 extension to DNS. It's similar to a CNAME record,
but you can create an alias record both for the root domain, such as
example.com, and for subdomains, such as www.example.com.
When you change the nameservers on GoDaddy any DNS you setup there will no longer be visible on the internet, only whats in Route53. Transfer any records you have created in GoDaddy to Route53 before changing your nameservers. Ignore any DNS records you didnt create.
If theres a problem you can goto GoDaddy and reset the nameservers back to default and that will restore the previous DNS.
One thing to mention - TTL - time to live. If DNS records have a high TTL (in seconds) it means when you make changes it will take upto that amount of time for everyone to get the update. The TTL will be visible in GoDaddy, or you can search "DNS dig" to find online tools that read DNS. The TTL of the NS records might be high (days, a week etc) - this will effect how long it takes Route53 to fully take over responsibility of your DNS.
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I am confused on the process of how to point a subdomain of an EC2 instance which is being run behind an ALB. The Target Group has port 80 which will then Redirect traffic to 443 and then a second Target Group which has the SSL certificate for 443. I have read online that I would need to create a hosted zone in Route 53 of the subdomain (e.g. apples.ilovefruits.org) and setup an ALIAS of the ALB. My domain and subdomains are hosted on Bluehost. The error I receive on the website to enter is a "403 Forbidden":
Would appreciate any help on this to get this to work.
UPDATE:
Should I replace the NS records of Route 53 with Bluehosts NS records?
I have read online that I would need to create a hosted zone in Route 53 of the subdomain (e.g. apples.ilovefruits.org) and setup an ALIAS of the ALB.
That's not true. You can delegate a subdomain and create an ALIAS record in Route 53, or you can create a CNAME record within your current dns provider.
An ALIAS record is an A record that will automatically resolve to an IP for the ALB without an intermediate CNAME lookup. This is great, but by no means necessary. An ALIAS record is a Route53-specific integration to other AWS resources.
Delegating a subdomain to route53 - at the cost of $0.50 a month plus a few cents per millions of requests - makes it more convenient to create with AWS dns records within that subdomain. It's especially useful if you're creating a lot of dns records that point to things in AWS. Creating records in your current DNS provider by hand is often an adequate solution until you're creating more than a few.
A route53 subdomain is also convenient if you're going to use ACM, amazon's cert issuing service. These certs are free, secure, and - if you use DNS validation - can renew automatically. If the domain of the certificate is in route53, the aws console for ACM will have a button to automatically add the validation record - convenient, right? But you can create the same record in any DNS provider, so again, until you're doing it a few times a week, the manual approach isn't so bad.
If you were to create a CNAME, do so in your current dns provider. Create a CNAME record whose name is your desired DNS name, and the value value is the ALB's dns name provided in the ALB details in the web console. This functions fine.
If you did want to delegate the domain, start by choosing the subdomain and creating its zone in Route 53. Take note of the 4 nameservers under the NS record there. These servers are ready to respond to requests for the subdomain, but nobody's going to ask them until you add these servers to your current dns provider as NS records for the subdomain. Then, public queries for the subdomain will be referred (or "delegated") to the amazon servers.
UPDATE: Should I replace the NS records of Route 53 with Bluehosts NS records?
No, The NS records for the zone in Route 53 are ready to serve queries for your zone, but that record is not what points any queries to those servers. The record that delegates the subdomain is in the parent zone (eg ilovefruits.org). Changing that NS record essentially does nothing. Above, we're *adding new * NS records for the subdomain, not changing anything that already exists for the parent domain.
If you're curious, the same is true of ilovefruits.org itself. In that case, the domain registrar also provides NS records for ilovefruits within the .org domain. As the domain registrant, you get to choose which servers these are. You could migrate your dns to amazon by changing these settings with your registrar. But strange as it may seem, even then, the NS records for the domain within that zone aren't being consulted for most dns lookups. DNS happens from the top level out, so .org is the domain that points to ilovefruits.org; it cannot, of course, point to itself!
Don't change the NS records of the root of your dns zone unless you're sure you know what you're doing. They aren't part of normal dns lookups and will be set appropriately by the dns provider, even if your domain hasn't delegated any dns queries to them.
The error I receive on the website to enter is a "403 Forbidden":
This has nothing to do with DNS and you should diagnose it separately.
We have purchased a domain lets say "xyz.com" from a third party domain provider. We have our resources in two AWS regions and we want to implement failover between the two regions using Route53.
We have created a hosted zone with the same name as of our domain i.e. "xyz.com" and created record sets in the hosted zone with failover as the routing policy.
But as our domain is external the record sets are not getting reflected.
Please suggest a way to achieve failover using route53 with domain hosted with an external provider without moving the DNS to Route53.
You won't be able to do this without switching to Route53 to host your domain. Route53 must be able to control the responses to queries according to the records you have configured. You'll have to delegate your domain to Route53 by setting the NS records to the values provided in the Route53 console.
If you don't change your DNS Nameservers to Route53 then that zone will have no effect.
You could however register a subdomain in Route53, e.g. myapp.xzy.com, and delegate that subdomain/zone in your third party domain provider to Route53. You may also add a CNAME in the main domain pointing to a record in the subdomain.
To Summarise:
Create a Hosted Zone in Route53 for myapp.xyz.com
In that zone add the two DNS records with a failover policy
In the root domain DNS, add the AWS provided NS Records to delegate a subdomain. e.g.:
myapp NS ns-123.awsdns-09.net.
If you created Apex A Records/Alias in step 2, use myapp.xyz.com
If you created CNAMEs in step 2, use mycname.myapp.xyz.com; or shorten by adding a CNAME in the root domain to resolve to that address.
Hope this makes sense.
You need to point the name servers for your domain to AWS name servers.
Basically, below are the steps -
Login to the website from where you have bought the domain.
Go to the domain DNS settings for your domain on the website.
Name Server records NS records must be pointed to the website name servers, change them to the name servers you have from AWS route53.
Wait for at least 24 hours to reflect this change.
I am following Heroku's instructions on how to get my AWS domain name on Route 53 to point to my Heroku app. The end of the instructions say:
"Go back to the Hosted Zones list and select your new hosted zone. There is a pre-populated Delegation Set section in the sidebar. These are the nameservers you need to provide your domain registrar for Route 53 to resolve your app domain."
I assume that the nameservers they are referring to are the four web addresses with "awsdns" in their name with type NS. My question is, who is my domain registrar and how do I provide these name servers to them? I originally bought this domain through GoDaddy before transferring it to AWS. Is GoDaddy my domain registrar? How do I determine this? Thank you.
Did you transfer the domain to AWS, or did you simply create a hosted zone for the domain name? If you transferred the domain to AWS, which it doesn't sound like you did, the nameservers are configured by Route 53 and are set. It sounds like you need to go to the Domain Settings via the GoDaddy console and set the AWS nameservers as your nameservers for your GoDaddy domain.
I have two public hosted zones in Amazon Route 53 for the same domain name (which has Route 53 as registrar), for the reason that Route 53 automatically created one when I registered the domain name and that the second one was created by Terraform.
As far as I can tell, DNS record sets in the second zone aren't applied, i.e. they're not returned for queries to the domain. Do I have to delete the first zone in order for record sets in the second zone to be active?
As far as I can tell, which hosted zone is active, meaning that its record sets are returned for queries to the domain, depends on the name servers registered with the domain. So, in order to make my second zone active I have to update the domain's name servers, in Route 53, to correspond to those of the desired hosted zone.
Following is an extract from the AWS Route 53 FAQ
Q. Can I create multiple hosted zones for the same domain name?
Yes. Creating multiple hosted zones allows you to verify your DNS setting in a “test” environment, and then replicate those settings on a “production” hosted zone. For example, hosted zone Z1234 might be your test version of example.com, hosted on name servers ns-1, ns-2, ns-3, and ns-4. Similarly, hosted zone Z5678 might be your production version of example.com, hosted on ns-5, ns-6, ns-7, and ns-8. Since each hosted zone has a virtual set of name servers associated with that zone, Route 53 will answer DNS queries for example.com differently depending on which name server you send the DNS query to.
Click here for more details
How is Domain-Name, Namespaces, and Hosted-Zone connected?
Imagine you bought a new name from GoDaddy - example.com. Then you setup your website in your EC2 machine which has IP 100.0.0.10. To point example.com to your webserver, you will need to first choose a DNS resolver. AWS provides one - Route53. A DNS resolver translates names like example.com to IP address like 100.0.0.10.
AWS Route53 has a concept of Hosted Zones. You will need to create a hosted zone for example.com. Route53 will then give you nameservers (bunch of different URLs, AWS gives you 4). You will take these nameservers and go back to GoDaddy and there is a section to put those nameservers. This tells GoDaddy where to send the request to.
Why did we do above ^^^ ?
When you purchased the name from GoDaddy, GoDaddy became your registrator i.e. it registered your name with the DNS authorities. So whenever someone requests example.com to the DNS authorities, they will forward the request to GoDaddy. So GoDaddy needs to know where to send the request to. These nameservers tells GoDaddy that exact information.
After the request reaches AWS Route53, it knows that this domain name example.com needs to go to 100.0.0.10.
What if I create 2 Hosted Zones with the same domain name example.com?
A hosted-zone is nothing but Route53's way to define a set of route rules for a domain.
If you have 2 hosted-zone with the same domain name, you will have 2 sets of namespaces. For AWS, each set has 4 namespace, so total of 8 namespaces).
So now it depends which namespaces you give to GoDaddy. You can give it set A, in which case your second hosted-zone will not receive any traffic. You can give it set B, in which case your first hosted-zone will not receive any traffic. Or, you can give it a mixture of both set A and set B, in which case GoDaddy will send some requests to set A and some to set B, not both though.
Right now our domain name and DNS are still hosted by our old provider until we make the full switch to Amazon AWS.
We run a lot of subdomains i.e. vendor.mydomain.com which were previously setup as websites on our old host. I deleted the subdomain on the oldhost and replaced it with a cname on the mydomain.com level for vendor to point to AWS, all is working well.
Now I need to add some TXT records for mailgun to verify my domain and I'm not sure where / how to do it.
Mailgun is looking for and expecting a CNAME record email.vendor.mydomain.com. I tried creating this on mydomain.com as I did for the vendor CNAME, it lets me create it but it never seems to be detected by mailgun.
I figure I could go with the configuration where I create a subdomain on my original host, but then the nameserver of my old host takes over for vendor.mydomain.com. In this scenario I'm all good with the Mailgun CNAME's etc, but I don't know how to effectively point to AWS for vendor.mydomain.com as the CNAME on the domain level no longer works.
Thoughts / suggestions welcome!
If, on the authoritative server for example.com, you have a CNAME record for subdomain.example.com, no other records on that same server can be valid for, or under, that subdomain, because the CNAME effectively blocks everything at or below itself by saying "stop, look elsewhere... specifically, look here."
Create a hosted zone in Route 53 for example.com. Note the 4 awsdns name servers it assigns to the hosted zone.
For each subdomain you need on Amazon, create 4 NS records for each subdomain on the example.com authoritative servers.
vendor NS ns-xxxx.awsdns-yy.com.
vendor NS ns-xxxx.awsdns-yy.net.
...etc., for the .org and .co.uk domains.
This delegates all lookups for that subdomain (e.g. "vendor") and all of its subdomains to the Route 53 servers, while leaving your existing servers authoritative for the records it still contains.
Then you can create records in the hosted zone in Route 53, including alias and CNAMEs as needed.