Amazon’s Route53 DNS service, along with several content delivery networks and other DNS providers let one create an “alias” pseudo-record that causes the server to respond to requests for one name with results for another name. While the ways current implementations of this function vary a bit, the biggest difference between all of them and a CNAME is that while a CNAME gets applied to every query regardless of the type of record something is looking for, an alias is specific to just one type of record.

While this sounds like a trivial difference, the benefits are surprisingly enormous. The most obvious effect is that it lets you point a bare domain name (e.g. example.com) at something else (e.g. www.example.com). The reason you can’t normally do this is because the CNAME record you would normally use to do this would conflict with the SOA record at the top of your domain, but since the alias you would use for this only applies to A address records, this is no longer a problem.

Another property aliases have is that they don’t actually go over the wire. While a CNAME record returns to the machine looking up a DNS name, causing it to restart its search with a different name, the answer for an alias comes right out of the DNS server’s own database. This means that aliases can only be used for records for which the server is authoritative or at least has some means of reliably learning the answer it should return, but that’s good enough for a great deal of use cases, notably including those of most content delivery networks. The fact that servers look up what an alias points to before they send anything over the wire means that they can include this functionality without violating standards – no one else needs to change their servers or their clients to support it. If DNS standards evolve to support it in the future, this makes transitioning even easier as that change rolls out.

In short, aliases would solve one of the most commonly-encountered shortcomings of DNS, namely its inability to use a CNAME to point a bare domain at its www equivalent. Given that there are multiple proprietary systems out there that do this already, it’s about time we standardized on an approach.