[object Object]
AWSDNSDOMAINROUTE 53

Hosting ASP.NET apps on AWS Part 7 - Domains and DNS with Route 53

How-to written and screenshots taken on 2020 January 31

To "find" and access the instances through the internet, we use the IP address or the Public DNS that AWS provides. In the case of our Windows instance these are: 18.195.19.249 and ec2-18-195-19-249.eu-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com. Not very friendly for our users to find our website.

use the public dns to connect through the remote desktop tool

To make it easier, the internet uses DNS to translate domain names into the IP addresses of servers. The service that AWS has build to do this is Route 53.

1. Domain registration

To route a domain name to your server you obviously need to own one. You can buy domain names from your own favorite registrar, but we assume you do it through AWS. There are two ways to get your domain name into Route 53:

  1. Register a new domain
  2. Transfer an existing domain

1. New domain

  1. On the Route 53 Dashboard type the domain name you want to register or go to Registered Domains through the menu and click the Register Domain button.

    register a new domain name

  2. Route 53 will check if the domain name is available and shows some alternatives. If it is available Add to cart and scroll down to click the Continue button.

    add available domain to cart

  3. In the next screen enter all your contact details and press Continue again on the bottom of the page. Optionally you can enter different data for Registrant, Administrative and Technical Contacts.

    enter contact details

  4. Check all the details, disable automatic renewal if you don't want that and accept the terms and conditions. Now you can click Complete Order.

    verify the details
    I'm going to cancel as I don't want jodibooks.net.

1.2 Transfer domain

We already owned our domain names, but we wanted to transfer them to Route 53. Instead of registering a domain name, we transferred it.

  1. To do that, you can click a link on the Route 53 dashboard or go to Registered domains through the menu and click the Transfer Domain button.

    transfer domain

  2. Type the domain name you want to transfer and click the Check button. If the domain is transferable, you can continue.

    check if domain is available
    I already did our domain name. Can't demo this.

  3. Route 53 will ask for the transfer code that your previous registrar will share with you when you cancel the subscription.

  4. Enter contact details as step 3 in the new registration.

  5. Verify details, disable automatic renewal if you don't want that and accept the terms and conditions. Now you can click Complete Order.

  6. You will receive an email that will ask if you agree with the domain transfer. If you confirm the domain is transferred within a few minutes/hours.

    confirm transfer of domain

2. DNS management

With the domains in Route 53 we can do the DNS management in Route 53 too. To do that we have to create a hosted zone (1 per domain).

  1. Go to Hosted zones through the menu and click the blue Create Hosted Zone button.

    create a hosted zone

  2. Enter the domain name for which you want to create the hosted zone and click the Create button.

    enter your domain name

  3. AWS will create the records necessary for the AWS name servers. We need to add an A-type record to our server. Create a Record Set and set type to A. Enter the IP address of the server as value.

    create the top level record

  4. Now create another record with name www, type CNAME and value jodibeauty.com (or your domain obviously). This will route www.jodibeauty.com to the IP address of jodibeauty.com. If the IP address would need to change for whatever reason, you only have to change it in one record.

    add cname for www

  5. If you need subdomains, you can enter an A-type record for each of them. We for example also have blog.jodibooks.com which routes to our Linux instance and beauty.jodibooks.com which routes directly to the application on the same instance as the homepage (and various API's).

    list of subdomains in hosted zone

3. Health checks

Route 53 has another neat feature: Health checks. A health check basically is just a ping to a destination you choose. If it gets an answer it'll assume the destination is healthy.

  1. Through the menu go to Health checks and click the blue button: Create health check.

    create a health check

  2. Enter a name, select Endpoint and Domain name and enter the domain you want to check: blog.jodibooks.com. We do a check on port 80, because that check is free.

    add domain to check

  3. After we click the Next button, we can add an alarm. What's the point if you get no notification...? Route 53 will send a message to an SNS topic and will subscribe at least one email address to that topic.
    Select Create alarm: Yes and send the alarm to New SNS topic. Choose a Topic name and enter at least one Recipient email address.

    create an alarm

  4. Create alarms for all (sub)-domains you want to monitor. You can create 50 free health checks and alarms as long as the resource your monitoring is an AWS resource (EC2 instance, load balancer, etc.).

4. Next: Email

During the creation of the health check alarm we touched the SNS service. SNS stands for Simple Notification Service and can only send simple, plain text messages. We'll return to SNS in more detail in part 14.

To our customers however we want to send styled emails and we want to receive email in a user-friendly manner. This is configured in the next part.