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.
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 a custom domain name, let's say example.co.uk. I originally purchased it through 123 Reg but have now transferred to Route 53. I have setup a Hosted Zone for that domain name.
I have been looking at many guides but for the life of me I cannot set the custom domain name, I can only access my site through the Elastic IP.
How can I get this to work?
Did you fully transfer the domain to Route53 or did you just change the name servers in 123reg to point to the Route53 name servers? If you fully transferred the domain, make sure you update the name server records in the Hosted Zone to match the name server records listed in the Route53 Registered Domains section.
To point your domain to your server you simply need to create an A record in the Hosted Zone that points to the Elastic IP. You also could have done that in 123reg without using Route53 at all.
I have one domain name registered in an AWS Hosted zone. It comprises of 5 records viz A, SOA, NS (4 ns addresses), MX and CNAME. But now, I want to create a Subdomain : static.domain.com. I have read Creating a Subdomain That Uses Amazon Route 53 as the DNS Service without Migrating the Parent Domain article from AWS doc but clearly that is not my case. My domain name is configured in the Route53 itself.
So if I have to create a hosted zone for the static.domain.com and update the NS records in the parent's hosted zone domain.com then I can just do that but I am confused if that's gonna work or destroy my whole configuration!
So guys, please tell me how to create the subdomain static.domain.com when my parent domain domain.com is also in the Route53?
FYI : I am creating this subdomain to serve static content from an s3 bucket which will be configured as an static website and will be aliased against this subdomain static.domain.com so that all static requests are can be fetched as http://static.domain.com/resources/path/to/dir/image.png etc.
Thanks very much
All you need to do is create a record set in your Hosted Zone, for your desired sub domain.
Go to your Hosted Zone
Click the 'Create Record Set' Button
In the dialog that appears on the right, enter your desired subdomain in the 'name' field. If you want static.domain.com, just enter 'static' in the name field.
Choose the Type of DNS Record you want eg, A, CNAME
Enter a custom TTL if desired, enter value(s) for your record and change the routing policy if also desired.
You have two options:
Create records in the existing hosted zone for the domain
Create an additional (dedicated) hosted zone for the subdomain, and create records in this dedicated hosted zone.
Both are explained below.
Option 1 (without a dedicated hosted zone)
In this case all we possibly can do is to change the list of the DNS records. And I believe primary record types to be configured are:
The A record type. It's like a [domain name to IP address] record.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/ResourceRecordTypes.html#AFormat
or the CNAME record type. This one is like a [domain name to another domain name] record
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/ResourceRecordTypes.html#CNAMEFormat
Note: NS record should not be changed, its value should remain default and is used as a primary link between the name servers and the hosted zone. The hosted zone itself is kinda named AWS container for DNS records (i. e. a thing that can be referenced within AWS ecosystem).
Option 2
Create a hosted zone that has the same name as the subdomain that you want to route traffic for, such as acme.example.com.
Create records in the new hosted zone that define how you want to route traffic for the subdomain (acme.example.com) and its subdomains, such as backend.acme.example.com.
-> You get the name servers that Route 53 assigned to the new hosted zone when you created it.
Create a new NS record in the hosted zone for the domain (example.com), and you specify the four name servers that you got after step #2.
Option 2 pros: having a dedicated hosted zone provides more flexibility for configuration and managing access to this configuration for other AWS users (IAM permissions). "Flexibility" here can be for example having not the same DNS service used for the domain and for the subdomain
Option 2 cons: "small" performance impact to this configuration for the first DNS query from each DNS resolver. The resolver must get information from the root-domain's hosted zone first and then get information from the subdomain's hosted zone. But there is a caching mechanism regulated by TTL (Time to live) value.
Reference: 'Routing traffic for subdomains'
Mon Oct 24 19:59:40 PDT 2022
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-routing-traffic-for-subdomains.html
See also an option-2-related article: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/create-subdomain-route-53/
Hope it helps and is somewhat educational.