1

When using a VPC on AWS DNS is handled in a neat way whereby any requests for the external DNS name for an instance in the VPC resolves to the local/private IP address of the node.

This is useful when using elastic IPs as you now have a permanent address for a node, even if the local address changes the elastic IP address external DNS name will update the local address.

I'm looking at options for linking VPCs in separate regions and it seems like the only option is to build VPN servers on EC2 instances and updating your VPC route tables to point to those boxes for the subnets at the far end of the tunnels. There doesn't appear to be anything built into AWS itself yet.

My question is, if I set up VPN tunnels in this manner do the AWS DNS servers know that nodes in the remote regions are available through private IP addresses now (and thus the external DNS names for the remote instances will reference private ip address through the tunnel)? If not does that mean I then also have to deploy internal DNS servers and have all nodes register their private IP addresses against a static hostname (which I also don't do...) so that there's any chance of routing down the tunnel?

Thanks.

yoshiwaan
  • 300
  • 2
  • 9

1 Answers1

1

No, the AWS DNS servers will return the public hostnames for the instances in the remote region. Your only recourse is to set up internal dns servers for this purpose.

Chad Smith
  • 1,389
  • 7
  • 8
  • The first part is correct, but the second part... you can provision vpc-level private zone files in Route 53, avoiding the need for actual DNS servers in the VPC. – Michael - sqlbot Jun 11 '15 at 23:31
  • You can only provision a private zone file for use in a single VPC, so you would need a zone file for each VPC, which would indeed pre-empt your need for actual servers, but you still need two zones. Depending on your planned implementation, it may be easier to deploy EC2 instances and have DNS slaves pointing to a single master. – Chad Smith Jun 11 '15 at 23:33
  • Thank you. I figured this was probably the case. Hopefully this is something Amazon has in the pipeline for one day. – yoshiwaan Jun 12 '15 at 02:58