Dynamic AWS resource discovery for one-click region spin-ups

Disclaimer: At the time of this article’s writing, I work at Amazon, but not in AWS. This article is based on my own research and ideas and is not the official position of Amazon. This article is not intended as marketing material for AWS, only as some architectural patterns for you to use if you do leverage AWS.

AWS provides a number of different resources that you can use to build services using, including S3 buckets, SQS queues, etc. When you create a new instance of that resource, you must pick a name that usually must be unique in a given namespace. Depending on your naming scheme, you may also have to start embedding resource names in code or configuration files. This makes spinning up new regions difficult as now you have to update configuration with names for every stage/region that you might use. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but consider that you may have tens of different SQS queues, S3 buckets, etc. for each region/stage. This can begin to combinatorically explode as you now have # regions * # stages * # resources of different configuration definitions. This results in a lot of boilerplate.

But what if there was a better way?

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Fast development environments

Setting up new hosts entries for every different web site that you develop is hard. This workflow allows you to completely automate it. First thing you’ll want to do is setup a wildcard DNS record that points to your host. This allows you to dynamically setup new development websites without having create new DNS records for each one of them. I created a fake internal-only TLD on my local network’s DNS server that automatically returns the IP address of my development VM for any query to *.devvm. If you don’t have access to that, you could re-use an actual domain and automatically forward something like *.dev.technowizardry.net to the VM. For example, I have the ASUS RT-AC68U router for my personal network. So I SSH’d to the router, typed vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf, then appended:

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