Dns

As of Februrary 2011 AWS S3 has been able to serve static websites, giving you superior availability for unchanging (or seldom-changing) content. But most websites today are not static; dynamic elements drive essential features such as personalized pages, targeted advertisements, and shopping carts. Today’s release from AWS CloudFront: Support for Dynamic Content alleviates some of the challenge of running dynamic websites. You can now configure a custom set of URL patterns to always be passed through to the origin server. This allows you to “poke holes” in the CDN cache for providing dynamic content. ...

Update May 2011: Now that AWS Route 53 can be used to allow an ELB to host a domain zone apex, the technique described here is no longer necessary. Cool, but not necessary. Someone really has to implement this. I’ve had this draft sitting around ever since AWS announced support for improved CloudWatch alerts and AutoScaling policies (August 2010), but I haven’t yet turned it into a clear set of commands to follow. If you do, please comment. ...

This article is a guest post by Guy Rosen, CEO of Onavo and author of the Jack of All Clouds blog. Guy was one of the first people to produce hard numbers on cloud adoption for site hosting, and he continues to publish regular updates to this research in his State of the Cloud series. These days he runs his startup Onavo which uses the cloud to offer smartphone users a way to slash overpriced data roaming costs. In this article, Guy provides another technique to track changes to your dynamic cloud services automatically, possible now that AWS has released Route 53, DNS services. Take it away, Guy. ...

How can you handle DNS lookups in EC2 without going crazy each time a resource’s IP address changes? One solution is to use an Elastic IP, a stable IP address that can be remapped to different instances, but Elastic IPs are not appropriate for all situations. This article explores the various methods of managing name resolution with EC2 instances. Features of Different Name Resolution Methods Before diving into the methods themselves let’s take a look at the factors to consider when evaluating methods of managing name resolution. Here are the factors: ...