Tag: aws

Migrating domains from Godaddy to Route53

Godaddy is one of the oldest and widely used domain services provider but after after having Route53 from AWS (Amazon Web Services) it is almost necessary (as per a developer and automation perspective) to move to Route53 or any other DNS provider which provides us APIs and other services to automate around the domains. Due to this requirements, I had to move a few domains to Route53 from GoDaddy.

Migrating domains from one DNS provider to another is a big decision and requires careful planning to avoid any down time. When we were doing this we planned this adequately and followed these steps which I believe can be helpful for others as well.

Steps:

  1. Reduce TTL for every record to a few minutes so when we are moving they start sending traffic to Route53 immediately. This is not a required step but recommended if you want to test it quickly. If your current TTL time is in days or weeks then this will take that much time to go live.
  2. Export zone file from GoDaddy.
  3. Import zone file into Route53.
  4. Announce downtime for maintenance on scheduled date to your customers.
  5. Initiate transfer from Route53. Refer to #2 in references.
  6. Accept and authorize it from GoDaddy. Refer to #3 in references.
  7. Verify the changes.

Verification:

  1. After completing migration, we will need to run the following for each record from zone file to make sure it is responding to DNS query both with name server and without it:
  2. dig +noauthority +noquestion +nostats myDomain.com
  3. dig +noauthority +noquestion +nostats myDomain.com @ns-AWS-DNS.
  4. nslookup -debug myDomain.com
  5. nslookup -debug myDomain.com ns-AWS-DNS.
  6. traceroute myDomain.com

References:

  1. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/MigratingDNS.html 
  2. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/domain-transfer-to-route-53.html?console_help=true
  3. https://pk.godaddy.com/help/transferring-domain-names-to-another-registrar-3560

AWS Volume Snapshot Automation

I am working on a small backup automation script for AWS (Amazon Web Services). Previously, I wrote this script shared on Github Gist here to take a snapshot of a specific volume for one user which is already being used in production.

Now I am thinking to add the following to this script:

  • Add support in script to be used by multiple AWS accounts in different regions.
  • Remove older snapshots and keep only the latest 3 copies for so.

I will share this script as a separate project on Github once complete.