The #1 thing I want from Route 53 is a "redirect record", as I have what feels like an infinite number of hostnames whose sole purpose is to be typo-fixes for domain names with multiple obvious spellings, and the current solution from Amazon involves me having to use S3 static web hosting with redirects combined with Route 53 in a way that makes the S3 console almost impossible to browse anymore due to the insane number of bogus entries.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10115799/set-up-dns-based...

(And S3's feature is brittle and itself complex to configure correctly. And it requires talking to Amazon to get a bucket limit increase. And it is actually super slow, for something that can and should be implemented using Amazon's Route 53 infrastructure rather than using Amazon's S3 infrastructure: if those same nodes that already are set up for anycast also listened for HTTP and returned what are essentially DNS requests made via HTTP for that one kind of record, the problem would be solved in a way that is clean from a conceptual level and efficient from an implementation level. It would be absolutely amazing.)

This seems like a use case literally every person with a website has: you need to redirect the .net and .org to .com, for example. I have a ton more, as I have things like {cydia,mobile}{-,}impactor.{com,net,org}, but everyone has at least a few. I mean, we also all have a redirect for "www." either to or from the bare domain, right? And that one is super performance sensitive as it is used constantly: it is stupid to have that in your app layer using those resources and incurring that latency, but that is how many people set that up.

It really seems like a simple problem to solve. Maybe "too simple"? Is it just not fun to work on? There are a ton of these things that would benefit every single user, from users who barely know how to build websites to people who build complex networks of cloud resources. Another example is virtual serial console access.

Many years ago I requested this one on their forums, and I just got an email notification earlier this year telling me someone else has added a +1, after this thread died down the year after I posted it. Way way too often there is an issue on a server where the SSH daemon can't start because of some tiny mistake: you just need to log in and correct one configuration option, or even more infuriatingly, press "y" at some operating system prompt that is blocking you. I catalogued other reasons I used that feature from my old hosting provider on the thread.

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=233302

Back in the day this was fatal to the server. With EBS you can unmount the disk from the computer, attach it to another one, modify it, and then put it back in the original computer... but that is not a reasonable way of solving this problem.

And this also comes up for experts: I have deployment scripts that automatically build computers, and debugging them is a pain in the ass. Amazon lets you see the console output, but it has some ludicrous delay on the data. If I could watch the process happen interactively, and then fix and continue issues while I debug my scripts, it would save me a ton of time.

My old hosting company actually had this feature, and I still use it to this day occasionally when there are network issues. If I want to mess with the box's firewall, I log in via the serial console, so I don't have to worry about firewalling myself from accessing the machine. It is downright epic.

All of the comments on Route 53 Traffic flow I am seeing here are "I can already do this better" and "I wouldn't use Amazon to build this kind of thing anyway". Solve the redirect problem: people seriously advocate for getting hosting from a cheap non-Amazon provider to do these redirects (that's what I do!) because there is no truly good way to do this currently. Build me a serial console: it is crazy that I feel like there is anywhere at all where a company like 1&1 has a better cloud-oriented feature for virtualizing running systems than EC2 :/.