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I'm about to deploy an app where users can add their own domain name to their profile. I need to give a fixed IP address for them update their DNS servers using Elastic IP.

I would also like to run loading balancing (and auto-scaling) servers.

Reading up, it seems that you can't assign an EIP to a load balancer, how would I achieve this?

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  • Is there a reason you must supply an IP address to your customers? Many similar functions from large SaaS companies use CNAME for this. – Matt Houser Feb 5 '17 at 17:18
  • If you use CNAME the user can only point a subdomain www.example.com. To use their naked domain example.com, it needs to point to an IP address. All website builders (which is what this project is) offer that service. – Jack Barham Feb 5 '17 at 17:21
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    Understood. Then EEAA's answer is correct. – Matt Houser Feb 5 '17 at 17:24
  • Thanks for the input Matt. I'm pretty new to AWS. With all the services they are offering, I was shocked to learn that mapping an IP address to ELB is not possible. Anyway. I'll investigate other options :) – Jack Barham Feb 5 '17 at 17:28
  • @JackBarham AWS targets a vastly different customer than website builder hosting companies do. To use an analogy, hosting providers are like hiring a general contractor to build your house versus with AWS, having a pile of tools and raw materials dropped off and doing the rest yourself. AWS provides the raw resources for building highly performance, reliable solutions, but they do precious little for you beyond that. I think this is the root of your confusion at the moment. – EEAA Feb 5 '17 at 19:26
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You are correct, ELB usage requires CNAME or Alias records in DNS. An A record will not work.

If ELB usage is a requirement, your customers will need to satisfy one of those requirements. Otherwise you'll need to run your own load balancing infrastructure, which could indeed be assigned an EIP.

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  • Thanks. When you say "run your own load balancing infrastructure", do you mean normal Load Balancing and not 'ELB' within AWS? – Jack Barham Feb 5 '17 at 15:15
  • That's correct, something like HAproxy running on one or more of your own EC2 instances. – EEAA Feb 5 '17 at 15:19

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