Company address for web services

[Acid0]

Hi there,

I would like to ask a stupid question for the guys that knows this but I just cant find any relevant info on the web to point me in the right direction(Maybe my google-fu is broken in this quarantine time )

For a POC and hopefully if everything works out at the end I am developing a web service server for our company for internal and external use.

Currently I have the server up and running but the address is just an IP address as the base url and the my uri is decently structured.

My question is how do you swap the ip address out to make it a company address for example "http://companyname.com/api/getcustomerinfo"

The idea is to actually put the service on a AWS account eventually when all the configs and bugs are sorted and will help with the mobility of the data accessing and retrieving.

I am just a bit stumped on how to get the address to look more professional.

Do you need to create an account and register the ip address or do you need to host the server somewhere or is it something you can configure on AWS itself

 

[WAslayer]

Amend your virtual host configuration to add a listen name which will be your domain name, i.e example.com.. steps to do this vary based on the webserver you are using.

You will have to have example.com registered with a registrar, so you can have a DNS zone publicly available, for people to be able to browse to your website from external..

You would also want to implement some way of restricting access to the internal part of your site..

 

[rustypup]

Caution here being the AWS transition... a Web App is somewhat different in config to something running on local tin. In many cases far simpler.

What's the underlying platform? This will determine how you handle bindings/rewrites/etc

 

[Acid0]

@WAslayer
@rustypup

Sorry for the late response.

Currently we are using Oracle ORDS to do the web services in house, but aiming to use Apche Tomcat to host the services in the future.

We have a couple of in house apps that is using the service already but because we will need to branch out and not sure if the oracle system will still be here in the next 4 years I would rather use it off site(Not in the main system) and AWS made more sense to make it public with some authentication and interact with any system in house that needs to info.

That is where the original question came up that I dont know how to register a web site name for the service to not be a ip address but rather a decent structured url going forward.

Regards

 

[gkm]

Why not go for AWS directly, otherwise you have to mess around with your company DNS setup, which might break other stuff:

Google Search

Also, you probably want to use some kind of prefix like:
dev.myapp.companyname.com
to allow you to host multiple applications and multiple environments for them.

 

[rustypup]

AWS made more sense to make it public with some authentication and interact with any system in house that needs to info.

Honestly, I'd budget rolling straight Web App, (AWS or As-You-Are). No fiddling with infrastructure, patching, load balancing, etc. We regularly have published apps/sites on both platforms pen-tested with no issue aside from bad coding practices on our part.

Both offer full function CNAME translation, (the public my.domain.com translation to backend service), as well as the typical A-Record stuff, (domain to IP translation). They both offer hybrid authentication tools as well as inter-cloud, which is pretty damned handy as we can manage access without making it a PITA.

For the domain side you need:
i) A registrar. (LexSynergy, GoDaddy, Safenames, Namecheap, etc.) Pricing varies based on various factors.

I don't, personally, like GoDaddy because they're shiat but that's personal experience talking.

LexSynergy offers excellent brand protection tools and Namecheap provides a solid, basic, service.

As @gkm rightly points out, if you're rolling in AWS, you have another option for registrar right there.

ii) A Certificate. Your choice of CA and typically a service you can abuse your registrar for. Here you can opt for either a wildcard, (*.mydomain.tld), or sub-domain cert. If your site isn't talking SSL these days, forget it.

Let's Encrypt offers a decent service for free but there are other considerations here - including them famously invalidating a horde of dodgy certs recently.

Again, pricing varies based on cert type, validity period, etc. The Let's Encrypt certs are free forever but have very short validity periods so you will be visiting cron to automate cert cycling.

iii) A DNS record pointing to the service. Requires editing the zone data to add A, CNAME, TXT, etc records depending on service and domain. Simple if you're managing your own DNS otherwise build in some buffer as it could take 8+ hours to propagate the change. Also don't forget to drop TTL before the change to speed this up, then revert it after.

If you're rolling on LAMP, then what @WAslayer said holds true. You need to include request header mapping for all domains in the configs in order to correctly map inbound requests to the matching virtual host presence, (not an actual virtual host), and may involve fiddling with re-writes - this can be tricky when dealing with SSL.

E&OE

 

[gkm]

If you go with AWS, you can also let them manage the certs (and the certs are free for the AWS provided ones), so you do not have to deal with the renewal hassles that comes with Let's Encrypt: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-overview.html

AWS also makes it really easy to host LAMP stacks and other Web Apps like that, if you prefer that to serverless via API Gateway and Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
This also automatically integrates with AWS ACM.

Maybe play around with a couple of these options. You can do a fair amount of testing for free: https://aws.amazon.com/free/

 

[Acid0]

Thank s a lot guys/gals(I know there is no ladies on the internet), I will go play a bit.

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction I do appreciate it.