Using Boto to associate a domain to an ELB

Micah Hausler - 26 November 2013

The last few months at Ambition, we've been busy working on automated customer signup and setup. We currently set up a separate subdomain for each customer that points to an Elastic Load Balancer. Up to this point, activation of each new customer has been a manual process: Initializing servers, setting up an ELB, and pointing a new subdomain to that ELB through the AWS web console.

In our preparation for automated signups, we needed a solution that would scale.The greatest benefit for us to using Amazon Web Services is that an API endpoint exists for every operation. For most services, boto (the AWS python library) has excellent walkthroughs, however for Route 53, only simple API documentation is currently available. After searching through Amazon's own Route 53 developer guide, we came across a tutorial for setting up a domain to an ELB. Since I could not find a tutorial elsewhere, below is a summary of how to associate a domain to an ELB.

Note: This example is for simple routing only. If you want to get into latency or weighted policies, check out boto's documentation on ResourceRecordSets.