Automating Dynamic DNS updating with AWS Instances and Route53

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 06:11:27 +0000

UPDATE: This information is long out of date. With the release of the awscli toolset in pypi years ago, things have changed a bit. Also, Amazon is forcing you to VPC on new accounts (years ago now). I will not be updating this post, but maybe you can find something useful here.

Recently I’ve been building the underlying system platform for the development of our distributed application on AWS. We do a lot of clustering using Storm and Hadoop, which means that we sometimes spin up hundreds of instances that may only live for a few hours during a run. Getting metrics, logs and all of those ‘must-haves’ centralized has been part of this build-out. When working with large amounts of machines in short-lived clusters, it becomes a real pain in the ass to use the built-in DNS/naming mechanism/scheme that AWS provides by default. Everything starts to look the same inside of your reporting/metrics/monitoring tools when working with the arbitrary names given to the instances. Hence, this article.

Cloud on Tate Eskew

Automating Dynamic DNS updating with AWS Instances and Route53