Using Route 53 to create subdomain names for your projects

If you create and deploy your own software projects to the cloud, at some point you probably end up with a number of things deployed to various places and unless you spend time maintaining your bookmarks to all these projects, it becomes hard to keep track after a while.

One of the interesting things about Route 53 is that you can create A records that resolve to IP addresses either within AWS or hosted elsewhere. If you have you own domain setup in Route 53, you can easily create subdomains with A records pointing to where ever these projects are hosted. e.g.

example1.youdomain.com -> x.x.x.x

example2.yourdomain.com -> y.y.y.y

A while back I deployed my Sudoku Solver React app to an S3 bucket hosting the website, and I can never remember the S3 endpoint name. But using a Route 53 Alias to the S3 endpoint, you can create whatever subdomain you need to point to the target resource. Here’s what it looks like setting up an alias:

Notes:

  • when you click in the Alias Target box you should see your S3 bucket already listed (if not, check you’ve enabled Static Website Hosting)
  • the recordset name must be identical to the first part of your bucket name (e.g. ‘example’)
  • the S3 bucket name must be the subdomain name plus full domain, e.g. example.yourdomain.com

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