Route53 config for Stringray Traffic Manager

Intro

The following config is for setting up Stringray Traffic Manager (STM) on EC2 and using Route53's DNS services to route traffic. I will not go into setting up STM as there are already a number of articles describing how to do this. 

Since I come from a development background, I found myself spending a lot of time learning network vernacular. 

My goal, as in the nGinX post, was to setup a Global Load Balancer for geo targeting requests and a Reverse Proxy. 

Stingray Traffic Manager 

STM is a high performance software and virtual Layer 7 load balancer that enables enterprises and businesses of all sizes to create, manage, and deliver key services more quickly, more flexibly, and at a lower cost. Stingray offers much more than basic load balancing. In addition to round robin or least connection load balancing with session persistence, the Stingray Traffic Manager provides advanced application health monitoring, SSL offloading, protocol offloading and session persistence. Stingray Traffic Manager can be seamlessly deployed in private, public, and hybrid clouds with 24 x 7 x 365 enterprise grade support.

STM works in the guts of networking as opposed to how nGinX works. Consider, when a browser makes a request, the domain resolution is received by a DNS over port 53 and handled accordingly. The handshaking between the browser and DNS is abstract to the client. Once an endpoint is determined and communicated to the browser, the browser will cache the result and bypass the DNS in future requests. ~ respectively.

In order for STM to influence requests it must preempt network traffic. First off, the domain must be pointed to Route53 so all traffic is handled by Route53. Two hosted zones must be defined. Lets start with the Top Level Domain (TLD) definition. 

Hosted Zone #1

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Top Level Domain Record Set for example.com

Record Type	Name	Value
NS	example.com	nameservers that get defined in the registrar
SOA	example.com	aws-supplied
NS	glb.example.com	stm.example.com
A	stm.example.com	ip of stm server
CNAME	www.example.com	www.glb.example.com

     Key Takeaways

       Notice the second NS record that is defined. 

       Notice how www points to www.glb via the CNAME. This means we need a     second hosted zone for glb.example.com 

Hosted Zone #2

---

Second Level Domain Record Set for glb.example.com

Record Type	Name	Value
NS	glb.example.com	aws-supllied
SOA	example.com	aws-supplied
A	www.glb.example.com	server-1 server-2    ... server-n

    Key Takeaways

       STM will have all the defined servers as well.