Setting Up Amazon Route 53 with Your AWS GovCloud (US) Resources - AWS GovCloud (US)

Setting Up Amazon Route 53 with Your AWS GovCloud (US) Resources

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.168.0.1 that computers use to connect to each other.

Route 53's DNS implementation connects user requests to infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services (AWS), such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, an Elastic Load Balancing balancer, an Amazon CloudFront distribution, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.

Route 53 can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS or to resources in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

To use Route 53 with your AWS GovCloud (US) resources, you must have an AWS GovCloud (US) account. If you don't have an account, see AWS GovCloud (US) Sign Up for more information.

To set up Route 53, go to the Route 53 console by using your standard AWS credentials. You cannot use your AWS GovCloud (US-West) or AWS GovCloud (US-East) account credentials to sign in to the standard AWS Management Console.

As you set up Route 53 to serve your AWS GovCloud (US) content with public hosted zones, keep the following in mind:

  • You must log in to the Route 53 console using your standard AWS credentials. Do not use your AWS GovCloud (US-West) or AWS GovCloud (US-East) credentials.

  • You will set up Route 53 to route end users to your AWS GovCloud (US-West) or AWS GovCloud (US-East) resources.

  • Route 53 is not within the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions so Route 53 is not within the ITAR boundary. Route 53 domain names, subdomain names, hostnames, aliases, cnames, and other record data fields are not permitted to contain export-controlled data.

  • To use Route 53 public DNS to respond to internet DNS queries for resources that you created using a GovCloud account, you must create a public hosted zone using a global AWS account, and create records in the hosted zone that specify the GovCloud resources.

    If you want to use the Route 53 console to create alias records in a public hosted zone that route traffic to resources in the GovCloud Region, such as an ELB load balancer or an S3 bucket, you can't choose the resource from the Alias Target list. You must enter the applicable domain name in the Alias Target field. For information about which value to specify for each type of resource and where to get that value, see Values for Alias Records documentation in the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.

  • To use Route 53 private DNS to respond to DNS queries from VPCs in GovCloud, you must create a private hosted zone using a GovCloud account.

  • For detailed information about Route 53, see the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.