While I’m working with Terraform, I’d thought I’d share the way I set up my DNS for my Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

If you want traffic to be routed to one of your services, you need a DNS. AWS offers Route 53 as a DNS Service. ‘Hosted zones’ in the route 53 service define records like a telephone book defines phone numbers. At the time of writing, every hosted zone you add will cost about $0.61 per month. If you buy a domain from AWS, Route 53 will make a record for 4 name servers that will translate the domain to an IP address. If the domain is registered with another party, AWS offers straight forward steps to either migrate from that party’s DNS to Route 53, or let you add records of external name servers to Route 53.

There are ways to use AWS Services with an external DNS provider, but I recommend Route53 to save you a headache.

Take a look at the AWS docs to learn more about those steps.