Dns

The problem Booting instances on EC2 is easy. But once it comes to connecting to them, you end up having to copy around transient and unwieldy ec2-....compute.amazonaws.com host names. So you manually set up a CNAME in your DNS to give the instance a friendly name, but as soon as you stop and restart the instance, the ec2 name has changed so your DNS record needs updating. Rapidly gets tedious! [Read More]

Due to the recent outage on GoDaddy a lot of people are reconsidering their DNS options. Amazon Route53 is a great option - cheap, flexible and well proven. To migrate you first need to export a zone file for the domain from GoDaddy. It’s been highlighted the zone files are slightly broken in CNAME records, so you may need run this fix over them: $ perl -pe 's/(CNAME .+)(?!.)$/$1./i' broken.txt > fixed. [Read More]

Amazon have launched a neat new Route 53 feature: latency-based routing. The idea behind this is when someone hits www.yoursite.com this resolves to the closest server to them, cutting latency. This DNS cleverness has been used by the big boys for some time, but not been available to us mortals without shelling out big bucks to someone like neustar/ultradns (shudder). The ’location’ of your server is determined by multiple DNS records for a given lookup, each with an EC2 region attached to them (us-east-1, eu-west-1, etc. [Read More]

If you’ve used Amazon webservices much at all you’ll probably have come across their DNS service route53. This offers very competitively priced DNS hosting on the Amazon cloud. To install: $ pip install cli53 The first step everyone migrating commonly goes through is getting their existing zones into the system. Invariably these are in the industry-standard bind format, but route53 uses its own format. cli53 assists in offering easy import of bind format zones: [Read More]