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Route 53 Amazon DNS

10 Dec 2010 by Misha Dragojevic

Amazon’s DNS Route 53 was released in December 2010. At the time of this blog, software is still in beta, there is no integration with EC2 Console or Elasticfox or any other tool / browser plugin. That makes it hard to use in day to day operations.

If you would like to try Route 53 even now, then read on, this article will shed some light on the topic.

Step 1: Install tools

Your main tool is Amazon’s perl script dnscurl.pl that uses “curl”

dnscurl.pl needs your AWS_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_SECRET_KEY. You can enter those on the command line, or you can create a file ~/.aws-secrets withe following format:

Step 2: Create Hosted Zone

Create zone XML file for “domain.com” (note “.” dot at the end of the domain name).
Name the file “domain.com.xml”

CallerReference has to be unique, like today's date. Now, push zone file to Roure 53 using dnscurl.pl

You should get response similar to this:

Above status is PENDING, but will change to ACTIVE once record propagates (few minutes). Make note of ZONE_ID, this is your DNS Zone ID that will be used in all subsequent requests. Name servers listed can be used afterwards to change your domain name servers. *Step 3*: Set DNS records Next step is to set some DNS records, for example A record for www.domain.com Create new XML file, name it www.domain.com.xml

Push new record to Route 53:

Make sure to replace ZONE_ID with your ZONE_ID! You should get response similar to this one:

Pending status will change to active in few minutes.

Step 4: List Zone Records

To list all of your zone records use the following:

*Step 5*: Verify your DNS name using dig To check if DNS name is set in Route 53, you can use dig:

Step 6: Update your domain to point to Route 53

Your milage will vary depending of your domain provider. In essence you want to change “Name Server” records for your domain so that they point to Route 53 servers (see step #2).