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Comment by isb | Hacker News Reader

CloudFront doesn't retry on 500s. Besides, you can't alias to a CloudFront distribution from x.com apex, so I don't think it would work for you even if that were the case.

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CloudFront, when used with Route 53 as your DNS provider, can be used for zone apex hosting, as you can place an "ALIAS" record (as opposed to a real DNS CNAME) to the other hostname; this is the same procedure you use to get S3's static hosting feature working with a zone apex and these new instructions today. (That said, I have never done this personally with CloudFront, as again: I do not use CloudFront.)

Nope. Route 53 has to ALIAS to another RR in your own hosted zone. There's no way for Route 53 to return the A records/IP address RDATA that CloudFront uses to direct clients to the fastest site.

Other "ALIAS" providers can't do real CloudFront apex support either. Their intermediate resolvers end up caching the CloudFront records without varying per client subnet.

Interesting! I was reading something in one of the FAQ's earlier that seemed to indicate that that works, but now digging further and reading through the forums, I see that you are totally right: you simply couldn't do build this use-case with pure-AWS (non-EC2) tools without having this new S3 static hosting redirection feature.

(As for non-Amazon DNS with server-side aliasing support, it wouldn't be that bad, for this kind of use case: you are already taking a latency hit by returning the 301, and direct links will never target these URLs as they will have the canonical www. hostname, so if you just end up with an edge node near a geo-ip DNS server near the original user, it will be approximately good enough.)

Route53 now supports at least S3 buckets and EC2 Elastic Load Balancers as alias targets. So it does more than just another RR.

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