Requesting a Custom Domain [Appian Cloud Administration]

Requesting a Custom Domain

This page applies to Appian Cloud only. It may not reflect the differences with Appian Government Cloud.

Note: Customers who are subscribed to Basic Support cannot use custom domains.

Overview

When Appian Cloud environments are created, they are assigned a subdomain under the appiancloud.com (commercial regions) or appiancloud.us (US GovCloud regions) domain. However, Appian Cloud customers can request to customize the Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN) of their environments to provide a personalized experience to end users.

This page outlines the steps required to change the FQDN of Appian Cloud environments to a custom domain.

About Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN)

An FQDN consists of three parts:

Subdomain: The first segment of the FQDN delineated by a period.
Domain: The main part of a domain name which represents an organization or entity.
Top-level domain (TLD): The last segment of a domain name, coming after the final period.

For example, in prod-environment.apps.mycorp.org, prod-environment is the subdomain, apps.mycorp is the domain, and org is the TLD.

Valid FQDNs

Valid domains and subdomains:

Only use alphanumeric (A-Z, a-z, and 0-9, case-insensitive) and hyphen characters.
Use 1 to 63 characters.
Do not start with or end with a hyphen.

Valid TLDs:

Only use alphanumeric (A-Z, a-z, and 0-9, case-insensitive) characters.
Use 2 to 63 characters.

FQDN configuration

Appian Cloud environments use 3 FQDNs. By default, these are:

	Commercial regions	US GovCloud regions
Main FQDN	`ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud.com`	`ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud.us`
Static FQDN	`ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud-static.com`	`ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud-static.us`
Dynamic FQDN	`ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud-dynamic.com`	`ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud-dynamic.us`

Only the main FQDN is visible to end users. You can choose to customize all three FQDNs, or the main FQDN by itself.

Note: If you are accessing your environment over VPN or in a dual access configuration, you must customize all three FQDNs.

Example

Your company domain is mycorp.org and you have an environment called production-acme currently using the appiancloud.com domain, available at production-acme.appiancloud.com. You want to customize this environment to use mycorp.org so that end users can access the environment using the FQDN production-acme.mycorp.org.

You can decide to customize all 3 FQDNs:

Old FQDN	New FQDN
`production-acme.appiancloud.com`	`production-acme.mycorp.org`
`production-acme.appiancloud-static.com`	`production-acme.mycorp-static.org`
`production-acme.appiancloud-dynamic.com`	`production-acme.mycorp-dynamic.org`

Note: When customizing a domain, the static, dynamic, and main FQDNs must be unique. You can use any valid FQDN configuration to customize the domain; each FQDN does not need to include the type, like static, dynamic, or main.

You can also opt to customize just the main FQDN of your environment. Appian Cloud will take care of handling the remaining two domains:

Old FQDN	New FQDN
`production-acme.appiancloud.com`	`production-acme.mycorp.org`
`production-acme.appiancloud-static.com`	`production-acme-mycorp-org.appiancloud-static.com`
`production-acme.appiancloud-dynamic.com`	`production-acme-mycorp-org.appiancloud-dynamic.com`

Instructions

Determine the FQDN(s) for the environments you wish to use a custom domain with.
Use Self-Service Certificate Management to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) with the required information, including your organization details and the FQDNs of all of your environments.
Use the generated CSR to obtain a set of signed, PEM-formatted certificate files from your organization's certificate authority. Do not generate a separate key or reuse a previously provided CSR.
Use Self-Service Certificate Management to provide Appian with the issued certificate files.
Open a new support case with Appian Support to deploy your certificate files. Consult the documentation for VPN only or dual access configurations if you are setting up your environment in one of these access options, as additional steps are required.

Note: Server Name Indication (SNI) must be enabled by clients to access custom domain Appian Cloud environments.

Certificate renewal

To renew your certificate, follow the renewal steps in Self-Service Certificate Management.

Frequently asked questions

Why do I need to set up three different domains?

The static and dynamic domains are used for background web requests to support features such as the Document Viewer Component and Component Plug-ins. These domains are needed for security purposes. Review the Post Install Configurations for more details.

Do I have to change the subdomain portion of my environment's FQDN?

You do not need to change the subdomain portion of your environment's FQDN.

What are the requirements surrounding the subdomain portion of the environment FQDN?

The subdomain portion of the environment FQDN must comply with the following requirements:

Subdomains should be representative of your organization.
Subdomains should be unique. That is, each subdomain must be different across environments.
Subdomains cannot be generic or include the word "appian" in their name.

Requesting a Custom Domain