Point subdomains to seperate EC2 instances

Question

Hi Everyone,  
  
Im compleatly new to AWS and Im building a school mangement system, I already own the domain name purchased through godaddy. I will need each school to have its own EC2 instance running as a web server for security and simplicity. Im trying to get it set up so each schools url for their site uses a subdomain of my domain name e.g. schoolname.mydomain.co.uk.   
  
After a lot of searching I managed to assign an elastic IP to my test instance and in my godaddy DNS assigned a type A record for a test subdomain name. This works perfectly so when I go to testschool.mydomain.co.uk it displays the page on the correct test server instance. But AWS says im only allowed 5 elastic IPs on my account and im hoping to have more than 5 schools use my software so what is the correct way to point each subdomain (schools name) to a different EC2 web server instance, im guessing its Route 53, Ive watched a few youtube videos about it but Im struggling to understand the setup between my godaddy domain name and Route 53 pointing to instances which dont have elastic IPs.  
  
Thanks,  
Matt,

cloudbutton · Answer

I'm assuming you don't have a tunnel in place or any sort of VPN connectivity to your AWS environment at this time.  
  
You should really really consider doing this 'right' in terms of best practices, from a security and resiliency standpoint.   This will be more work to learn, but worth it in the term.  
  
You should then consider setting up an application load balancer (you only need one for all the subdomains, and pointing your DNS to the CNAME of the load balancer. The security group of the ALB should accept incoming traffic on port 80/443 from 0.0.0.0/0.  You then setup the listeners for 80 and 443 as necessary, and target groups for your schools.  
  
Setup the EC2 instances in a public subnet (since you don't have a vpn to access).  Don't worry about the Elastic IPs, but have it generate a public ip (that's a checkbox when spinning up the systems):  Have the security group of the EC2 accept 80 and 443 ONLY from security group of the ALB above.  
You can also open up port 22 to your specific IP address(es) for ssh control, etc.  
the EC2s then get registered in the target groups created above. Then, in the ALB listeners, you create rules to route traffic based on the host header (e.g. subdomain) to the different target groups.  
  
Complete the solution by actually spinning up the EC2s in autoscale groups..you don't actually need to implement autoscale policies, but if an EC2 dies (fyi: EC2 DO DIE, and you should actually never run just one of anything as a best practice), a new one will spin up in it's place:  If your AMIs are ready to serve up traffic, or you have some configuration management that will automate the configuration of that EC2, then everything self-heals in the event of an issue.  
  
Alternatively, you can look at Elastic Beanstalk, which automates some of the above for you.  
  
fyi, the EIP is a soft limit..you can request more..but you really want a load balancer in there for this use case.  
  
Probably more than what you were looking for, but I hope it helps.

Point subdomains to seperate EC2 instances

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