Creating ALIAS Record for Zone Apex in Route 53

Question

A customer is currently using Akamai CDN and are evaluating Route53 for their DNS needs. They only get CNAME records for their CDN from Akamai. They want the zone apex of their domain to also point to their CDN. Given that, in Route53, you can’t redirect queries from an ALIAS record at the zone apex to a CNAME record, what is the best way to accomplish this? I was thinking making the ALIAS record at the zone apex point to a CloudFront distribution (which Route53 allows) and then using Lambda@Edge triggered by Viewer Request events to redirect the requests to their Akamai CDN. Any thoughts on this?

Accepted Answer

As apex records must be A records, and Route53 aliases effectively lookup their destination to return the IP addresses when they are queried, aliases have to point to other AWS resources (such as CloudFront CDNs). Your suggestion would be a good solution. It is also recommended to redirect HTTP requests for apex domains to their www records.

My recommendation is to make sure the Lambda@Edge is configured for the origin-facing request event, and sets a high Cache-Control max-age header in the response. Also make sure that you can handle both HTTPS and HTTP requests.

Creating ALIAS Record for Zone Apex in Route 53

Contenido relevante