Route53 to S3 static website redirect from https to http

Question

I have setup my domain in route53 with 2 different weighted A entries:

• "live": points to the live application (load balancer with ec2 instances)
• "maintenance": points to a static S3 website (html page telling site is down)

So I have scripts that make the live application go in maintenance mode and back to live (change weight of both A entries). This works perfectly, only now I access my application with HTTPS and this does not work with the S3 static site. Is it possible with route53 or somewhere else to make https calls redirect to the s3 static website using http?

Answer 1

No, it isn't possible to change schemes from http to https using DNS... and redirecting from https to http is still going to require a successful connection to some kind of endpoint that also has a valid SSL cert for your domain.

However... an interesting way to handle this would be to use Cloudfront, which would allow you to install your same SSL cert to front-end the static site in S3. If your users' browsers can reasonably be expected to support SNI, this seems like a winner.

You'd want to configure the bucket as a "custom" origin with the S3 website endpoint as the origin... and you'd want Cache-Control headers on the bucket objects, configured so that browsers don't cache your "maintenance mode" pages. (Actually, you'd want that, whatever you do).