Register a domain in Route53

Introduction

AWS has the a service for DNS integrated on its cloud infrastructure, this service is called Route53.

On Route53 you can register your domains and issue your certificates. Some of the advantage of using Route53 over other independent DNS services are:

• It is on AWS. You use the same cloud platform for everything. Consistent UI, customer service, invoicing, billing system, etc…
• It is designed to be really easy to use

In this article I am going to show the process of registering a domain with Route53 and creating a certificate for the domain, so your website or your web application can receive HTTPs traffic.

Register a domain

In this example I am going to register the domain humangovfg.click but you could follow the same sequence of steps to register any other domain of your choice that is available. You can see the sequence of steps below:

Note: On top of the chosen domain, Route53 suggests similar domains with different extensions .com, .net, .org etc. The price vary depending on the chosen exception. In my case I chose the .click extension because it is the cheapest one, but depending on your purpose you may want to have a different extension.

In my case I chose the duration of the domain for 1 year and I unchecked the Auto-renew option. You may want to consider a different duration and the auto renew option depending on your purpose.

On the next step, as domain holder, Route53 will ask you for your physical address, it is a standard requirement from the IANA that all DNS providers must fulfill during the registration.

Once you finsih the registration process you will see an screen like the following one.

After finishing the registration process you will get an email to confirm that your email address is correct. Once you confirm your email address, the domain registration and DNS update will takes a few minutes (~15).

Once the process finishes, you will see your domain under the Hosted zones dashboard.

Creating a certificate for the domain

For creating a certificate for your domain you will need to go to AWS Certificate Manager and request a new public certificate. In my case *.humangovfg.click .

You might be wondering why the *. at the beginning. The * at the begining is a wildcard. The reason to specify that wildcard is to match all possible subdomains subdomain.yourdomain.click i.e. california.humangovgf.clik , florida.humangovfg.click , etc … By doing this, the certificate provides protection to all possible subdomains so there is no need to create more certificates.

At the endo of the process you will see your certificate in the List certificates dashboard. As you can see the certificate has the status Pending validation , the process takes a few minutes until the certificate is issued.

You can see the different record that have been created for your domain:

Once the process finishes your certificate will get the status issued and then you can start using it.

Last but not least you might want to copy the certificate ARN. The domain ARN will be necessary i.e. if you plan to use the certificate to allow HTTPs traffic to some application orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Summary

This article showcases how you can create a domain on Route53 (the integrated DNS service in AWS Cloud). After that the article shows how you can issue a certificate that will allow secure traffic for your domain and all possible subdomains of your domain.

This is an example on how you can make use of the full potential of the cloud, not only using the cloud infrastructure but also the integrated DNS service and fully administer your web applications within the AWS cloud.