Hi,

Been trying to wrap my head around how DNS is used in Clearwater with multiple 
instances. This is purely for purposes of understanding the concept. I have not 
looked at the chef installation and operation procedures, but I assume the 
concept will be the same?

Here is what I understand so far and please correct me if I am missing 
something here:

  1.  Each server will have it's own clearwater/config configuration 
referencing the server function as a FQDN, e.g. sprout.tld, homer.tld, etc. 
This will be the exact same config across all servers and instances of servers 
except for the TLD, private and public IP.
  2.  The reason DNS is used is because multiple answers will be returned for 
each server type and "/etc/hosts" cannot be used to load balance responses.
  3.  Each server instance will have it's own public and private EC2 IP when 
created.
  4.  The private IP address changes each time the server is restarted, but the 
public IP remains across restarts.
  5.  Each server instance public or private IP has to be in a central DNS 
server.
  6.  Each time a new server is added or removed, the DNS entries have to be 
updated. Cache will be an issue here.

>From this it seems that there is a lot of adding and removing of servers from 
>the central DNS and that cache would become an issue? As an alternative I have 
>seem some ideas around assigning Elastic IPs to instances and keeping the 
>elastic IPs in the DNS entries. This way there is no caching issue when 
>assigning the same elastic IP to to a new instance that has failed.

So some of my questions are:

  1.  Can the clearwater config file not somehow be simplified and the private 
and public IP be gleamed from the instance itself? Simple ifconfig and hostname 
would return all three values.
  2.  If the private IP address changes each time an instance is restarted, 
this requires reconfiguration of the config file and the DNS entry? Will 
caching be an issue?
  3.  What is best to use for DNS? Route 53 or a separate DNS server? Route 53 
does not seem to support private IP DNS entries (can be publicly accessed) and 
requires a public TLD.
  4.  Can /etc/hosts be used for simple single instance demo systems instead of 
DNS?

Lots of questions I know, but important to understand ;-)

Thanks
Des Hartman

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