Route53 — Portfolio Projects
Build these projects to demonstrate real skills to employers. Each project is designed to be interview-worthy — something you can walk through in detail.
Project 1: Multi-Record Hosted Zone with Terraform
Level: Beginner | Time: 1-2 days
Stand up a hosted zone and manage every common record type (A, ALIAS, CNAME, MX, TXT) as code — the DNS equivalent of "hello world," but with the gotchas that actually trip people up in production (apex records, TTL tradeoffs).
Steps
A/ALIAS record (prove to yourself why a plain CNAME is rejected at the zone apex)
www CNAME pointing at the apex, an MX record, and a TXT record (e.g. for domain verification)
dig takes to reflect the change from a resolver that already cached it
CNAME and an ALIAS record resolve to when queried with dig
Skills Demonstrated
GitHub Repo Name
route53-hosted-zone-terraform
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Project 2: Blue/Green Deployment with Weighted Routing + Health Checks
Level: Intermediate | Time: 2-3 days
Deploy two versions of a simple app behind two endpoints, then use Route 53 weighted routing plus a health check to shift traffic gradually — and to prove automatic rollback works when the "new" version starts failing its health check.
Steps
A/ALIAS records for the same name, each with a distinct SetIdentifier, starting at 100/0
dig results change across repeated queries
/health path and confirm Route 53 stops returning it even while its weight is still nonzero
Skills Demonstrated
GitHub Repo Name
route53-weighted-bluegreen
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Project 3: Multi-Region Active-Passive Failover with Private + Public Zones
Level: Advanced | Time: 4-5 days
Design a DNS layer for an application running in two regions — one primary, one standby — with automatic failover, plus a private hosted zone so internal services resolve each other without touching the public internet.
Steps
db.internal) and confirm it does NOT resolve from outside the VPC
Skills Demonstrated
GitHub Repo Name
route53-multiregion-failover
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Tips for Great Projects
Make it real. Solve an actual problem, even a small one. A weighted blue/green traffic shift you actually watched happen via repeated dig queries is more impressive than a tutorial clone.
Document everything. A repo with a great README beats one with better code but no explanation. Include: what it does, why you built it, how to run it, what you learned.
Show your thinking. In interviews, you'll be asked: "Why did you choose X over Y?" Have a reason. Architecture decisions matter.
Iterate publicly. Make commits regularly. Employers look at commit history. 10 commits over a week shows real work; 1 commit with everything shows you copied it.