This is the third and final post in a series related to the implementation of Oracle WebCenter in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. In the first two I covered the setup of a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Instances that reside in it. In this post, I’ll cover the setup of Route 53.
Route 53 Setup
Route 53 is Amazon’s scalable Domain Name System (DNS). You will use it provide a friendly DNS name to your WebCenter system and to provide secure and reliable routing to your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer. To get started, click “Route 53” on the Amazon Web Services Dashboard.
You can register a domain with Amazon, or use a domain name that you’ve registered elsewhere. Whichever the case, you’ll need to create a hosted zone for that domain. A hosted zone is simply a collection of resource record sets for a specified domain (such as yourdomain.com). If you registered your domain through Route 53, AWS will automatically create the hosted zone for you. Assuming you’ve done this, your Route 53 dashboard will list your domains and hosted zones. Click on hosted zones to modify the record set.
At the Hosted Zones screen, check your zone then click “Go to Record Sets”.
In my scenario I plan to use the domain apex for WebCenter and an admin subdomain for Fusion Middleware administration (ie: WebLogic Console and Enterprise Manager). If you plan on doing something similar, create two record sets using values like the ones below.
| Field | Record Set 1 – applies to the domain apex | Record Set 2 – applies to the admin subdomain |
|---|---|---|
| Name | mydomain.com | admin.mydomain.com |
| Type | A – IPv4 address | A – IPv4 address |
| Alias | Yes | Yes |
| Alias Target | Your load balancer | Your load balancer |
| Routing Policy | Simple | Simple |
AWS makes it easy to associate your load balancer with your domain and subdomains because you’ll see them listed in a dropdown of available alias targets. With this step complete, AWS will route all mydomain.com and admin.mydomain.com traffic to your load balancer. This way you don’t have to use the default AWS load balancer URL (example: lb-XXXXXXXXXX.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com) to reference your WebCenter site.
At this point your AWS WebCenter environment is fully prepared. Your friendly DNS names (mydomain.com and admin.mydomain.com) will route traffic to your load balancer, which in turn will route traffic to the web tier EC2 instances setup previously in the 2nd post of this series.
You can move on to preparing the file system for each host and installing and configuring the web tier and WebCenter software, much as you would on any host in any environment.
