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Thanks, byoung2! I will add that edit to the blog. If you could elaborate, I'd love to describe a little clearer how it works practically.
by heyrhett 14y ago
Thanks, byoung2! I will add that edit to the blog. If you could elaborate, I'd love to describe a little clearer how it works practically.
- byoung2 14y agoBasically, the zone apex (example.com) has to point to an IP address (a DNS A record). The problem with some AWS services (e.g. S3, Elastic Load Balancers, Cloudfront) is that you don't have a static IP address to point to because as scalable services, you are hosted over many servers which can change at any time. If you host your DNS on Amazon Route53, you can take advantage of Alias records, which are exclusive to Amazon. Basically, an alias record lets you point example.com at a resource (S3 bucket, load balancer), and Amazon will periodically look up the current IP address and return it when that record is looked up. These records are served with a relatively short TTL to allow for constantly-changing IP addresses.