Domain Name System (DNS) records

The Reliability Engineering team is responsible for managing several DNS zones.

By default, zones are hosted by AWS (Route 53) and Google Cloud Platform (Cloud DNS)

As of Feb 2019, there are 40 hosted zones. A list is retrievable from a terminal using:

  aws route53 list-hosted-zones | grep Name

Some individual records within these zones are managed by other teams.

Amazon Route 53

Use the “production” account. Speak to Infrastructure if you require access.

Google Cloud DNS

Use the “production” account. Speak to Infrastructure if you require access.

Records for GOV.UK systems

There are a few domains that we use:

• alphagov.co.uk is the old domain name that GOV.UK publishing used to live on. We maintain records that point to Bouncer so that these URLs redirect.
• publishing.service.gov.uk and govuk.service.gov.uk are where GOV.UK lives.

Making changes to publishing.service.gov.uk

To make a change to this zone, begin by adding the records to the yaml file for the zone held in the DNS config repo.

We use a Jenkins job that publishes changes to publishing.service.gov.uk. The job uses Terraform and pushes changes to the selected provider.

Jenkins

When the changes have been reviewed and merged, you can deploy them using the “Deploy DNS” Jenkins job.

You will need to copy and paste the below variables into Jenkins for each operation. These can be obtained using the AWS CLI:

aws sts assume-role \
  --role-session-name "$(whoami)-$(date +%d-%m-%y_%H-%M)" \
  --role-arn <Role ARN> \
  --serial-number <MFA ARN> \
  --duration-seconds 28800 \
  --profile gds \
  --token-code <MFA token>

If you’ve set up AWS CLI correctly you can get the Role ARN and MFA ARN with cat ~/.aws/config.

Changes should be deployed for each provider (AWS & Google) separately, first run a “plan” action, and when you’re happy with the changes, run “apply”.

Within the Jenkins job, select the provider, zone & action. Once build is complete, examine the logs before progressing to the next stage (Apply).

Note

• Due to the Terraform state being held in an S3 bucket, you will require access to the GOVUK AWS “production” account to roll changes for both Amazon and Google.
• The order in which you deploy to providers is not important.
• You will not require credentials for Google Cloud. These credentials are stored in Jenkins itself.

Making changes to internal DNS (govuk.digital and govuk-internal.digital)

Currently these zones are only used in environments running on AWS.

These DNS zones are hosted in Route53 and managed by Terraform. Changes can be made in the govuk-aws and govuk-aws-data repositories. While GOV.UK migrates to AWS speak with Reliability Engineering for support making your changes.

DNS for the gov.uk top level domain

Jisc is a non-profit which provides networking to UK education and government. They control the gov.uk. top-level domain.

Requests to modify the DNS records for gov.uk. should be sent by email to naming@ja.net from someone on Jisc’s approved contacts list. Speak to a senior technologist member of GOV.UK or Reliability Engineering if you need to make a change and don’t have access.

2nd line should be notified of any planned changes via email.

• gov.uk. is a top-level domain so it cannot contain a CNAME record (see RFC 1912 section 2.4). Instead, it contains A records that point to anycast IP addresses for our CDN provider.
• www.gov.uk. is a CNAME to www-cdn.production.govuk.service.gov.uk., which means that we do not need to make a request to Jisc if we want to change CDN providers. Just change where the CNAME points to.

Delegating service.gov.uk domains

At the moment Reliability Engineering are also responsible for delegating DNS to other government services.

The request will arrive by email or Zendesk from a member of the GOV.UK Proposition team. The request will contain the service domain name that needs to be delegated and more than one nameserver hostname (usually ns0.example.com, ns1.example.com).

In Route 53, create a new node for the service domain underneath service.gov.uk and add NS records for that node.

We do not manage DNS for service domains. If you get a request asking you to add anything other than NS records, it should be rejected. This is so that we’re not the single point of DNS for government.

There are ongoing plans to move this responsibility to a different part of GDS.

Other weird bits of DNS

If you receive a request to change any other DNS that hasn’t come from the GOV.UK Proposition team, send it to them using the Zendesk group “3rd Line–GOV.UK Proposition”.