The Problem
The Skpr platform serves all web requests with CloudFront, a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds.
CloudFront requires that site owners use a CNAME (alias) when configuring DNS due to CloudFront's massive, dynamic, global edge network.
CNAME records are becoming common as more development teams move to using CDNs which inheritantly have dynamic, fault tollerant infrastructure which cannot have a fixed IP address for an A record.
Clients want to use their Apex domains (eg. example.com) for their websites but due to a limitation with DNS a CNAME record cannot be created at this top level of the domain.
The Solution
To solve this issue we operate a service, with static IP addresses, which redirects apex domain web requests to an appropriate subdomain eg. https://example.com/test will redirect to https://www.example.com/test.
This Skpr apex redirect service offering is an amalgamation of the following AWS managed services:
- AWS Application Load Balancer - Serves traffic and handles the redirect logic.
- AWS Global Accelerator - Provides static IP address for the ALB instance so we can use an A record.
- AWS Certificate Manager - Allows us to automatically provision certificates for clients.