Route53 workflow for DNS Setup and Routing

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Amazon Route53 is highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System(DNS) web service. Amazon Route53 is fully compliant with IPv6.
It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications.

You can use Route 53 to do three major functions:
1. Domain Registration.
2. DNS routing and
3. Health Checking.

We will be majorly focusing on first 2 function only:

Register Domain Names

Route53 let you register a name for your website or web application known as Domain name.
Steps to Register Domain Name:
1. SignIn to the AWS Management Console.
2. Open Route 53 Console.
3. Under Domains Go to Registered Domain than click on Register Domain.
4. Enter the domain name you want to register and choose check to find out whether the domain is available.
5. If the domain is available, choose Add to cart

What Route53 returns after Domain Registration

Few Things which Route53 returns after the successful Domain Registration:

Registered On: Date on which domain was originally registered.
Expires On: Date and time when the current registration of domain expires on. The expiring period is typically 1 year as a minimum and up to 10 years.
Domain Name Status code: EPP status codes which tell you the status of different operations performed on Domain name.
Transfer lock: If the domain is locked, the value of Transfer lock will be Enabled.
Auto-renew: Whether route53 will automatically renew the domain shortly before its expiration.
Authorization code: Code which is required when you want to transfer this registration to another registrar.
Name servers: Route53 servers that responds to DNS queries for this domain.

Route internet traffic to the resources for your domain

when a user enters your domain or subdomain name in the browser in address bar then route53 helps in connecting the browser with your web application or website.

After you register your domain name route53 automatically creates public Hosted Zone that has the same name as the domain.

To route traffic to your resources you create Records in your hosted zone. Each record includes information about how you want to route traffic for your domain.

How to create Records in Hosted Zone:

Name: Name of the record corresponds with the domain name or subdomain name. The name of every record in a hosted zone must end with the name of the hosted The process which Route53 console does this for you automatically.
Type: The record type which determines the type of resource that you want traffic to be routed to. eg: if you want to route traffic to an email server that the record type should be MX. Type can have multiple value like A, MX, CNAME, SOA etc
Value: Value is closely related to Type if I specify MX as a type then I need to specify one or more email servers for value.

Process of routing traffic to your domain

After configuring the route 53 to route your internet traffic to your resources:

The user enters your domain name in the web browser eg: http://www.example.com.
The request for the domain http://www.example.com will be routed to a DNS resolver.
DNS resolver for the ISP forwards the request for http://www.example.com to a root name server.
DNS resolver forwards the request for http://www.example.com again, this time to one of the TLD name servers for .com domains. Name server for .com domains responds to the request with the name of four Route53 name servers associated with the http://www.example.com domain.
DNS resolver caches the four Route53 name servers. so that next time someone browses for http://www.example.com then it will skip the 3rd and 4th step because it already has the name servers for knoldus.com. Generally, they are cached for 2 days.
DNS resolver chooses a Route53 name server and forwards the request for http://www.example.com to that name server.
Route53 name server looks in example.com hosted zone for the example.com record, gets the associated value, such as IP address of a web server and return this IP address for a web server, 42.111.7.68, to DNS resolver.
DNS resolver finally has the IP address that the user needs, resolver returns the value to the web browser. (DNS resolver can also cache the IP address for the amount of time that we specify, so can it can respond quickly).
The web browser sends a request for http://www.example.com to the IP address that I got from the DNS resolver. This is where our content is, for example, a web server running on an Amazon EC2 instance.
The web server or other resources at 42.111.7.68 returns the web page for http://www.example.com to the web browser and web browser will display the page.

( * ) Wild Card Usages in Hosted Zones and Records :

Hosted Zone:

Hosted Zones can’t have * at leftmost side in domain name. For example, *.example.com is not allowed.
If you include * in other positions DNS treats it as * character not a wildcard.

Records:

* as a wildcard in the name of a record, must replace the leftmost label in a domain name for example , *.example.com , *.blogs.com.
* in any other position such as prod.*.example.com DNS treats it as a character not a wild card.
* must replace the entire label. You can’t specify prod*.example.com or *prod.example.com.