Project Goals

 

  • Improve international DNS reliability
  • Improve branding over GoDaddy (a distant 2nd!)
  • That's it! (not changing registrars, not cleaning up bad zones, not enabling special Route 53 features yet)

Owners

  • GoDaddy Zone Exports: Laurent
  • GoDaddy NS Changes: Laurent
  • Route 53 Imports: Sandy

10

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Project Goals

 

  • Improve international DNS reliability
  • Improve branding over GoDaddy (a distant 2nd!)
  • That's it! (not changing registrars, not cleaning up bad zones, not enabling special Route 53 features yet)

Owners

  • GoDaddy Zone Exports: Laurent
  • GoDaddy NS Changes: Laurent
  • Route 53 Imports: Sandy

GoDaddy

 

Pros:

  • Easy (integrated with registrar)

  • Free (well, maybe not a "pro" after all!)

 

Cons:

  • Notable DNS timeouts from US-Midwest and overseas

  • Not really that bad, but we can do better with Route 53

Route 53

 

Pros:

  • Highly reliable and distributed

  • Used by Amazon itself (CF NS = *.awsdns.com)

  • Great CF integration (zone apex aliases - Phase II)

  • Branding improvement over GoDaddy

 

Neutrals:

  • VE public sites already rely on cloudfront.net + CF

  • VE private sites will rely on Amz instead of GD (meh)

Route 53 (cont.)

 

Weaknesses:

  • Extremely simplified feature set (some rarely used DNS features missing, e.g. multiple TXT records)

  • No export via GUI, only via API

  • No IXFR/AXFR

Zone Types

Core Zone:

  • well-known primary domain of web property (vaneck.com, marketvectors.com.au)
  • records that suggest that it has use beyond web redirection (i.e. sending mail or bound URL)

 

Web Stub Zone: 

  • used to catch typos or in digital marketing, but is always redirected at the HTTP level

 

(Highly informal/internal classifications!)

Zero Impact

 

  • NS change is graceful and automatically propagates

  • No urgency to leaving GoDaddy

  • No dependency between zones, so can be migrated one-at-a-time

  • Zones were imported as-is (except for SOA and NS adjustments, of course) so same records and TTLs

Phase II

  • Introduce CloudFront distribution aliases in place of @ A 1.2.3.4 records: greatly improves manageability

  • Clean up bad records (old ISA IP, etc.)

  • Delete some unused zones completely (?)

More Ideas

  • Where a public IP is referenced in the AD (internal) copy of a zone, make a stub zone instead

  • Allows some records to be managed @ Route 53 while also having internal-only records within vaneck.com

  • Still won't work for the zone apex, though