This post has been cooking for a while, and goes with the 4 part series John Moy and Sascha Wenninger have completed on Installing NetWeaver Gateway in the AWS Cloud. As I have been working in the Amazon cloud I have been working on larger and larger landscapes, but never really moving above the magic 10 or 11 hosts needing static IP addresses. This means that I can request the AWS increase my allowance of 5 ElasticIp addresses to 10 without really getting into too much grief, although over time I have known that this is a short road to nowhere and I would need a better solution. Route53 to the rescue, last year AWS released Route53, their own homegrown DNS service, and all seemed right with the world - well except for the fact that it had been a very long time since I had configured DNS, there were no GUI tools for it and I was too busy to learn it since I was in the middle of an upgrade project. So I soldiered on using ElasticIp addresses, for no better reason than I was being lazy and it was easy.
Now that I have had some time to do some more digging and maintenance on my AWS landscape, I have found a nice and simple way of configuring the DNS on my servers to use Route53 and to allow me to stop using IP addresses or hosts files and use the correct tools for server addressing.
- The 1st thing that is required is that you must have a purchased domain -
(Side Story : I do not have a recommendation on a registrar but the one thing I would look for in any small print is who actually owns the domain once the initial term is up - there was a number of high profile cases where the company bought a domain through a registrar, built a good reputation over a few years and then wanted to transfer the domain. The registrar refused to let the company transfer the domain, because the registrar had actually bought the domain - they let the company lease it until it became valuable and then tried to sell it to the company at an inflated profit.)
- Once you have your domain, then you need to sign up to Route53, a simple task if you are already an EC2 user
- From the AWS Web console it is now possible to create a HostedZone
- Once the Hosted zone is created it will create a Unique Id for the zone and a number of service records
(Hosted zone console details)
(Hosted zone full details)
(Hosted zone service records)
Now we have our hosted zone and the capability to put records into Route53, we just need a way to populate it with records and this is different obviously depending on whether you use Windows or Linux.The trick is to have the host update it's DNS once it starts up, as AWS EC2 is based on hourly billing, most sensible people do not have their servers running 24*7 - so they shut them down when not in use. The annoying part is that when they start up again, they have a different IP address, the instructions below will detail how it works.
Linux - CentOs, RedHat, AmazonLinux
This part of the post is something I cannot claim total credit for, at most 30%, the rest belongs to Simon McCartney (He is a great guy, excellent #DevOp, and general font of useful information) - there are 5 components to this solutions
1. DNSCurl.pl - this is a perl script which will work enumerate Route53 services
It is advisable to use the following commands to ensure you have all the required software at the right version
sudo yum install perl-Digest-HMAC
sudo yum install perl-XML-XPath
2. .aws-secrets file - this file holds your AWS Keys, the location is specified in the DNSCurl.pl file
3. route53DynDNS.bash - this is the base script which use the DNSCurl perl script to set the hostname and IP records in Route53
4. Startup script - rd.local file is used to run scripts upon startup
Windows - to be honest, this is much simpler
I used the application Route53DDNS which I found on GitHub - in this you set the Fully Qualified Hostname of the server
Also the AWS credentials
In order to get it running once the system starts a scheduled task needs to be set up so that it runs once the system starts and without a user logging on
Once you have this set up then the system (Windows or Linux) will update the Route53 accordingly and you will be able to use DNS to administrate your connections much more effectively. The only wrinkle that I forsee is the AWS Firewall and it's configuration, I suspect that I am going to have to do something script based to ensure that inter-server communication through the firewall is kept open and easy - but that's for another post I fear.
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