

Amazon EC 2 - What you may not have known - ericb
http://blog.codesta.com/codesta_weblog/2008/02/amazon-ec2---wh.html

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brk
The solution presented is really sub-optimal.

DNS data gets cached at many layers, and often times caching DNS servers won't
honor extremely short TTL's, they'll default to caching data for at least 4-24
hours. So while your DynDNS info is updated, you can't rely on the fact that
the rest of the world is going to be similarly up-to-date.

A better solution would be to break down an actually host a machine someplace
where you can count on it having a static IP. Use Apache, haproxy, pound,
squid, or a proxy of your choice to manage the dynamic IP's of your EC2
machines. Connections come into this static machine and are dispatched to the
appropriate EC2 machine.

There is really no reliable way to have a 24/7, "5 nines" sort of presence
relying solely on EC2.

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ericb
Heaps of nines could be part of the sales pitch if they constructed things a
little differently. It's a shame, really.

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brk
True, but I think they want it this way for a reason. Amazon is really cherry-
picking the best part of the colo business with EC2. They get to charge people
a decent rate for a moderately powerful server with a public IP address, yet
they really don't have to provide much beyond "best effort" availability. 99%
uptime is easy, it's those 9's after the decimal point that get costly.

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jdavid
1st i love ec2.

but here is a caveat, dynamic DNS servers do not rank as well with spam
filters as static DNS.

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axod
The other point I didn't see mentioned in the article is that reverse DNS
lookups look a bit horrible, and you can't change the reverse DNS :(

