Moisey,

This is a custom DNS product offered on Amazon Route 55 and SimpleDNS and does what the OP says — it allows you to point an apex domain (example.com) to a CNAME record (some.otherdomain.com). This is a necessary feature for PaaS offerings such as Heroku as without it you wouldn't be able to point your naked domain to your Heroku app. Since Digital Ocean now offers Dokku as an image option, the team should take a second look into offering this custom record type so that we may use Dokku to its full potential.

Hello,

Please, where can I find the standard DNS definition?

I would love ALIAS records on DigitalOcean. I understand your preoccupation to follow the standard, but it is very very useful.

As mentioned, Route55 does something similar, but its very restrictive in its use (I believe you can only alias internally in your AWS account, not externally).

However, there are a few good examples of this "CNAME Flattening" out there in the wild.

DNSMadeEasy supports this extension to DNS on their side via their ANAME record. DNSimple does the same via their ALIAS record, and resolves separately per region, which is why my company picked this offering for our clients custom domain integration. I also believe Cloudflare does it via "Managed CNAME". Essentially, each of these examples, a CNAME type record (with a custom type, e.g., ANAME or ALIAS) is defined for the root of the domain on the DNS providers system. When queried for an A or AAAA record, the query still resolves to the end user as a simple A/AAAA response, however the result of the record is calculated by their DNS servers frequently behind the scenes and saved as an A/AAAA record so it functions more like a CNAME. If the A/AAAA record behind the aliased record changes, it will be reflected very soon (depending on DNS TTL) on the aliased record. We rely on this functionality through DNSimple to be able to allow our clients with custom domains to be able to take advantage of our DNS load balancing for optimum performance/reliability which would otherwise requires us to run our own Anycast type BGP setup.

I urge you to reconsider this feature request, as its not exposing any NON-RFC features to the lookup, simply offers greater flexibility for your clients in how the records are defined in your system. If you add support for this feature, we'll be happy to add you to our list of recommended providers for our custom domain integration at my company (http://help.geni.us/support/solutions/articles/3000037397).

Probably to this https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169056-CNAME-Flattening-RFC-compliant-support-for-CNAME-at-the-root

For anyone supporting this suggestion: please vote here https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/17390029-add-dns-aname-or-alias-record-type