I am new to AWS Route53 and trying to brush up some of the basics. I have a question that might sound silly.
Lets say i have a public load balancer created with its DNS (AWS auto generated). Now i went ahead and got my corporate company to create a CName for the actual ELB A record, so say that CNAME is www.my-website.com.
Now when users start browsing www.my-website.com, their router DNS directly know where this public www.my-website.com is hosted and then once the DNS resolution happens, the request is directly forwarded to my ELB that has that CName to it.
Now all this is good but i would also like to play with Route53 here, so i go ahead and use Route53 to create a hosted zone and add my domain www.my-website.com under it and then create a record set with alias pointing to my actual ELB followed by rest of the configuration.
Now when someone hits www.my-website.com on their browser will the request directly go to the ELB or go to Route53 that will then route it to that ELB?
A summary of what these services provides is below:
Route 53 is a DNS Provider provided as a service by AWS. The functionality you're describing using is to store your DNS records within it for resolution.
An ELB is an appliance to distribute traffic across multiple nodes.
With your records in Route 53 the below journey takes place:
When a client in the browser attempts to go to www.example.com it will first check in its internal cache for any previously stored values for the domain, if theres a value it will be evaluated against a TTL to see if it has been expired.
If no value or expired the client will connect to the root domain, then the top level domain continuing until it finds the DNS provider for your domain (. -> .com. -> example.com..
Once it finds this DNS provider it will query for your domain, if it matches it will return the resolution value and the TTL.
If the value is that of a CNAME (such as an ELB) this process will begin again to resolves the IP address(es) for your hostname. This IP address will be cached by your local client.
If you're using Route 53 and an ELB one advantage would be to use Alias records they actually set your domain record to the IP address which improves the speed of DNS resolution.
So in summary Route 53 is only contacted if the client does not know the resolution value for your domain.
Related
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.
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.
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.
I have been asked by a small business to setup some load balancing for them. One server is based in Sydney, the other in London.
I am thinking of using Amazon's Route53 traffic flow offering. The thing is they do not want to delegate the domain to my control. They are happy however for me to create another domain which I would have control of.
Is there any reason why I couldn't setup that new Domains NS records to point to AWS. Then load balance traffic requests coming to that new domain to the appropriate original domain?
I'm guessing any health checks would have to be against the original domain.
There is nothing stopping you from doing that as long as the new domain is a public hosted zone in R53 and you are using R53 for the NS.
In R53 you will need to use a CNAME resource record type to point to the original domain, and the health checks associated will need to be for the original domain as you say.
I used the AWS certificate manager to create an ACM certificate.
I followed this guide: https://medium.com/#arcdigital/enabling-ssl-via-aws-certificate-manager-on-elastic-beanstalk-b953571ef4f8#.kjh1mqdzq to configure the load balancer using the aws cli.
When I look at my load balancers, I now see 443(HTTPS, ACM Certification:[arn]) forwarding to 80 (HTTP) under Port Configuration
However, if I type in https in my browser I get the "your connection is not private" message from chrome.
Is there another step that I'm missing?
You haven't given this info, but I'm assuming you have a CNAME for www.yourdomain.com that is resolving to loadbalancer.amazonaws.com.
You are getting the ERR_INSECURE_RESPONSE error because you are using a CNAME which is resolving to loadbalancer.amazonaws.com. Since your certificate is for www.yourdomain.com, it is giving a valid error. CNAME and Alias operate slightly differently. With a CNAME the traffic is not a valid alias of your domain so if you're trying to secure it, you will receive errors. However, when you create an A record for www and alias that to loadbalancer.amazonaws.com now any traffic from loadbalancer.amazonaws.com on www.yourdomain.com is valid traffic for your domain and you will no longer have those errors.
In order to terminate secure traffic for www.yourdomain.com at loadbalancer.amazonaws.com you need to have an A record that will alias there. Unfortunately, ELB's only provide a DNS entry, no IP address, but many DNS providers (ie GoDaddy) will not allow you to have a DNS A record that is aliased to a DNS address; they require you to alias to an IP address. Which makes life a bit more complex.
There are a couple ways to accomplish this (URL forwarding and masking is not supported by SSL), but the easiest solution is to use Route 53. Use of Route 53 doesn't require you to register or transfer your name to AWS and a hosted zone is just $0.50/month per domain.
To use Route 53 follow these steps:
Create a Hosted Zone for yourdomain.com. When you create a Hosted Zone in Route 53 it will complete a few default records (like an A, NS, and SOA records). Note the NS records as you'll need them later.
Next copy your existing zone file entries (like MX records) from your current DNS provider to your new hosted zone.
When it comes to a record that you want to direct traffic for to your ELB you'll enter the name, say www, and then just below the type option field you'll see a radio option that says "Alias: yes no". - - When you select yes, the value field will disappear and you'll see an option that says "Alias Target: Enter Target Name". When you click that field you'll receive a drop down list of resources in your account that you can alias to. Simply select your load balancer.
Click create, and you're done with Route 53.
Now that all your dns records are copied over, and you'll go to your registrar and change the nameservers to the ones that Route 53 provided you.
Now Route 53 is handling your DNS for you. And loadbalancer.amazonaws.com is a valid alias of www.mydomain.com. Since loadbalancer.amazonaws.com is now a valid alias of www.yourdomain.com when you visit www.yourdomain.com your ELB at loadbalancer.amazonaws.com will terminate the traffic as www.yourdomain.com and your error will be resolved.