Route 53
Route 53 is a really powerful dns service offered by AWS. In this section, we're going to buy a domain name and set it up a hosted zone in Route 53. This will allow us to use DNS features with any resouces we setup in this course.
You can buy a domain name from wherever you want, but I personally use Namecheap, so all my examples will be using a Namecheap domain.
Production Hosted Zone
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This is your new hosted zone. You'll need the NS values for the next step.
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Once you save these name servers, your hosted zone is all setup. You are now able to start using your new domain name however you like.
But currently this domain can only be used from the production account. When we're developing apps, it's nice to be able to use dev.domain.com or other subdomains when testing things out.
Playground hosted zone
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Your production hosted zone should look something like this
Now you can use your.domain from the production account and play.your.domain from the playground account.
You could do the same for the development account, but we won't need that for now.
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Route 53 is a really powerful DNS service offered by AWS, and it integrates
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really well with all the other services within AWS. So I want us to set up Route 53
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right now with a domain name so that we can use it for the rest of the course and integrate it
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with any other services that we set up. For this, we're actually going to start in the production
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account instead of the playground account, which we'll be using mostly in this course, because I
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want us to set up a domain name in the production account. This will allow you to then use that
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domain name for any production infrastructure you want to set up, and we'll set up a
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subdomain in the playground account so that we can still
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play around with DNS without using the main domain name.
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So in the production account—that's what I'm in right now—we're going to go over to Route 53,
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and we can just click on Get Started over here. What we're going to be doing is setting up
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a hosted zone. Right now, we can register a domain in Route 53. We can purchase the
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domain through AWS. I'm not going to do that right now, but I will just click on Get Started
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just so you can see what this would be like, because you could enter a domain. I could go, uh, let's
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see, cloud...course, and it's going to check pricing for all of these. So here is the pricing
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for cloudcourse. There's a couple of different domains. I wonder if they have .xyz, because
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those are usually really cheap. If you don't want to spend a lot of money and you just need a
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domain name for this course, you can always try something like a .xyz domain. Those are
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usually pretty cheap. And AWS does have cloudcourse.xyz. It's fourteen US dollars.
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But if I compare that with something like Namecheap—let's go cloudcourse.xyz—I can see
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that I'm actually going to get that for two dollars for the first year anyway. It might retail at
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thirteen ninety-eight for the years after the first one, but I can get that much cheaper for
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now. So, instead of purchasing this through AWS, I generally purchase my domain somewhere
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else, then set up a hosted zone in AWS for that domain name. So you could purchase this through
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here—it'd be a little bit simpler—but what I'm actually going to do is go back to the
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Route 53 dashboard here. If we click Get Started, we can actually just create a hosted
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zone with a domain name that we purchased somewhere else. Like I said, I'm really only doing
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this to save money and manage my domains in a single location. Then, when I want to use them
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with AWS, I can just set up a hosted zone for them. So we're going to create a hosted zone in AWS.
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And this is actually as far as we can get before we need to go buy a domain name. So I'm going to
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buy my domain name through Namecheap. You could use a different provider—I use Namecheap for all
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my other domain names—so really, any provider would be fine. So I'm going to go with this,
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I'm going to go with cloudcourse.xyz. I'm going to add that to my cart and then
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purchase that straight away. This is just two dollars for the first year. So, like I said, if you
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just need a domain name to test things out for the first year, this is a really cheap way of
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doing it. Now that that's been purchased, I just need to find the dashboard for whichever provider
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you're using to manage that domain name. So I'm going to click this Manage button here and I should
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be able to find a name server section. So, right here, I can see it's using Namecheap's basic DNS.
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We're going to use custom DNS. So this is where we're actually going to head back over to AWS and
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create that hosted zone. So we're in Route 53, hosted zones, create new hosted zone,
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and I'm doing this in my production account. I need to enter the domain name that I just
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purchased—exactly the same domain. It's probably worth just copying and pasting this to make sure
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you don't get any typos. So this is cloudcourse.xyz. I'm setting up a hosted zone for my
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domain name, and this is a public hosted zone. We're going to be able to use it over the public
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internet. So that's all I need to do there—create hosted zone.
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And hosted zones are not part of the free tier. This is going to have a monthly cost—I think it's
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around fifty cents. Each month, you're going to be paying fifty cents for each Route 53
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hosted zone that you have, so we're going to have one in production and one in the playground account. Now that's been created,
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here we go. We should have this NS record within Route 53, and this is what we need
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over here on the right. So these are the name servers we need to put in to Namecheap or whatever
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you're using, which I have over here. So actually, I'm going to split these up so I can see
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this better. I need to enter each of these name servers. So that's
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the NS record—there's four of these values here. So I'm
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going to copy them each individually. There's nameserver one...
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There's nameserver two, I need to add the third one...
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and then the fourth one here. I'll just click Check.
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This can take a while. It could be done in a few minutes, or it could take a couple of days for
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this to completely propagate, but once this is finished, my cloudcourse.xyz domain name is
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going to be completely managed by Route 53. So anytime anyone makes a request to that
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domain name, it's going to be resolved by Route 53 in AWS, and this will make it really
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easy to integrate that into any service that we use within AWS. That's the hosted zone set up in
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the production account, and I now want to set up a second hosted zone in the playground account so
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that we can use a playground version of this domain name. So I'm actually going to close this
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production account window and head into my playground account.
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Inside the playground account, I'm kind of going to do the same thing. So I'm going to open up Route
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53 once this loads...Route 53.
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So this is the playground account, remember, and I'm going to get started and create a hosted zone
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in my playground account. This time, I'm going to give a subdomain and just call this play...
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dot cloudcourse.xyz. So the subdomain here is just play dot. It can be any subdomain, but
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I'm just going to stick with play dot. Then we're going to create this hosted zone. It has to be a sub
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domain of the exact domain you just made, but any subdomain will work. Then I'm going to scroll down again.
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It might be zoomed in too much. I'm going to grab these NS records again. So this is just like
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before, but we're not going to input these into Namecheap, because now all DNS things for all these
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subdomains are going to be managed by the production hosted zone. So what I'm going to do is copy
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all of these values, close the playground account again, and go back
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to the production account and back into that hosted zone for the production domain. So I'll go
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Route 53, then go into my hosted zones and select that cloudcourse.xyz
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hosted zone, and I'm going to create a record.
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This is going to be an NS record, which in the dropdown menu is right here—NS, name servers for
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a hosted zone—but I can't select it because I haven't entered a subdomain yet. So I'm going to enter
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the exact same subdomain, whatever I called that—play. So it's play.cloudcourse.xyz, and
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now I should be able to select NS right there. So this is NS, name servers for the hosted
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zone, and then I'm going to paste in all those values. These are the nameserver values from the
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playground account. So now, anytime we're trying to resolve the domain name cloudcourse.xyz,
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it's going to be managed by this production account hosted zone. And what we're saying here is that
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anytime we try to resolve play.cloudcourse.xyz or any subdomain of that, we're actually
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going to use the playground hosted zone. So all of those requests will be handled by the playground
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account's hosted zone. We can create these records here. Now that should all be done, so the
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production account's hosted zone will look like that, and the playground account hosted zone will
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just have the one set of nameserver records. Now we're able to start working with Route
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53 in both of those accounts. Like I said, it might take a little while for the name
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servers to propagate before we can fully use this, but we can check if it's working. So, after
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you've completed the Route 53 section, you can head over to the assessment part after
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and run cloudcourse run setup-route53 to check that everything has actually been set
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up correctly. So, over in Terminal, I am just going to run this command, and I need to select
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both my playground and my production accounts here. Uh, this is common—it's been a little while
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since I've logged in. So, let's log back into AWS with aws sso login. And now, let's try running
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that again. I need this to be the playground and the production accounts, and then I'm going to
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select the production zone here. So, let's form without play. It's saying that the NS records
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are wrong, which could happen for a few reasons. It hasn't propagated yet. If I run `dig NS`, then I
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can see, yeah, it doesn't have the right nameserver records.
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This could happen. It could just take a little bit of time for this to work, but if you
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set up your domain name with somewhere like Namecheap, you should double check your account
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to make sure there aren't any issues with your account, like if there were any payment
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issues or identification issues, Namecheap might actually not allow your nameservers to be
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changed. So, you should double check that. I'm pretty sure in this case it might just be a timing
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thing or I might have to go check my Namecheap account. We'll see—I took a little break and then
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just ran dig NS against the domain name again and it looks like everything's looking pretty good.
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So I'm going to try running the cloudcourse CLI again, selecting playground and production, and then
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I'll select the production version, and it's just going to check again to make sure everything's good.
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And yeah, it's looking like those were set up correctly, so we're good to go now. If I go back
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to cloudcourse, I can see that, yeah, I have done everything correctly for this part. So now I'm ready to move on to the next section.