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We're currently evaluating different PaaS providers for node web application hosting. The leading figures seem to be AWS and Azure.

We've got a decent system working in Azure but it's not as good as I would like. Multi-region hosting with a traffic manager to distribute, and we've just cnamed over a subdomain to the traffic manager endpoint. Easy.

I've got the same multi-region hosting working in Elastic Beanstalk but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to multi-region load balance with Route 53 with having to switch the nameservers on the domain. We don't want to do that, we've got far too much stuff on our domain and we don't want to transfer it all. All we want is an endpoint to cname to. Is it even possible?

Andrew Schulman
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Beliskner
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1 Answers1

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Yes, it's possible.

You don't have to migrate your entire domain to Route 53. You only need to delegate the subdomain to Route 53.

Your domain is example.com, and the subdomain is app.example.com.

Create a Route 53 hosted zone for the subdomain, app.example.com. Route 53 will assign 4 nameservers¹ to the domain.

ns-xxxx.awsdns-yy.com
ns-xxxx.awsdns-yy.net
ns-xxxx.awsdns-yy.org
ns-xxxx.awsdns-yy.co.uk

With your existing DNS privider, create a record for app.example.com but instead of an A record or a CNAME, create an NS record with these 4 values that Route 53 assigned to your hosted zone.

With this, DNS queries for the subdomain will be delegated to your Route 53 hosted zone, where you will configure the settings exactly the same way as if you had migrated the domain to Route 53.

¹Note that the top level domains are all different, for redundancy, and are not related to the actual nameserver locations. Route 53 is anycast, so these 4 servers are not 4 actual servers, they are a large number of globally-distributed servers that all respond to DNS queries on the associated IP addresses.

Michael - sqlbot
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