Let’s look more closely at the DNS configuration and domain registration for bergw.xyz, both of which are managed in AWS Route 53.

Domain registration

Amazon Route 53 is a domain registrar. It offers very reasonable pricing and I have found them much more straightforward to deal with than other very popular registrars. AWS sends clear, factual emails reminding you of decisions you need to make and detailing your contractual responsibilities, without any advertising, upselling, or other cruft.

Route 53 domain registration is an automated process, and monthly fees are paid for separately from the AWS account bill using a registered payment card.

The AWS web console suggests alternative TLDs, which suggested the .xyz domain to me. It was created in 2014 by an ICANN registry operator named Daniel Negari:

Generation XYZ® combines Generations X, Y and Z to create a global community inspired by the Internet and its limitless potential. We’re giving internet users – young and old, near and far – an innovative new platform to connect with the world in a whole new way.

Uh oh. This TLD sounds way too cool for me. If I buy it, will everyone laugh at me like that time I brought a yo-yo to school the exact week the fad died? If only the last letter of my surname was ‘v’, we would have a run of 5 alphabetically consecutive letters.

.xyz is for everyone.

Do you fall under one of these categories? Then .xyz is for you. If not, that’s OK too – .xyz is still for you. As one of the most affordable and flexible domains on the internet, .xyz is for every website, everywhere.

Ok, that’s reassuring.

A word on other Route 53 services

Besides its core functions of domain registration and DNS record management, Route 53 comes with supplementary services that are not forward in the project design stage. Let us know about your experiences with them in the comments.

• Resolver for bespoke VPC DNS resolution (usually to synchronise the VPC with other datacentres as part of hybrid cloud).
• IP-based routing, to “optimize performance or reduce network costs”.
• Traffic Flow is a visual flowchart tool for defining arbitrarily complex conditions for DNS routing, taking into account service failover, client latency and geolocation data and more besides. I think it’s a really cool solution looking for a problem.

Public hosted zone and DNS records

Once the domain is registered, the only thing left to set up in Route 53 is the public hosted zone, and to furnish it with DNS records that route the subdomains.

An A record for www.bergw.xyz is aliased to the CloudFront distribution for the S3 bucket. Read about the implementation of the HTTPS-only static site served from S3 via Cloudfront in part 3 of this blog series.

A records route other subdomains, like blog.bergw.xyz, to applications running on secured EC2 instances. Read about the routing and how I plan to deal with scaling in part 4 of this blog series. LINK HERE