ylastic blog

You have all your domains nicely imported into Route53 using Ylastic. You have scheduled backups of your zones to the S3 bucket of your choice for DR using Ylastic. You do have those zones backed up, right? You can view an audit trail of all the changes/additions/updates being made to your zones in Ylastic. And now you can view the spending break-down for all of those zones in Ylastic Plus. View the spending for the current month, previous month, curent year or the last year.

Easily view the cost associated with each of the zones you are hosting in Route53. The chart also displays the total number of queries made for the displayed zones in the chosen time period.

More integrated cool tools for Route 53 in the pipeline. Manage your AWS cloud, the easy way!

Route53 introduced a new feature that lets you configure DNS based balancing between EC2 regions. Yes, you heard that right. Between EC2 regions. How does this magic happen? By leveraging a new R53 concept called Weighted Alias resource records, that let you define multiple mappings between your zone apex and your ELBs, as well as assign weights to the mappings.

This works great, but do keep in mind that this is a round robin scheme and may not be suitable for all kinds of apps. This is a great start, and looking forward to more neat stuff from the route53 team. Enjoy :-)

This blog post is outdated. Route53 has since released new features and Ylastic has integrated them. Please check these posts for the updates:

• http://blog.ylastic.com/weighted-round-robin-balancing-between-ec2-re
• http://blog.ylastic.com/weighted-resource-record-sets-with-route53

AWS just released a nice feature named zone apex association for mapping the apex of your hosted zone in Route 53 with an elastic load balancer. No more jumping through various hoops and redirects to make queries for a domain such as xanthe.us resolve to your wonderful ELB in EC2. The magic all happens using the concept of Alias Resource Record Sets, which are aliases that point to DNS names in any Route 53 hosted zone. And here's how easy it is to set it up with Ylastic.

Enjoy :-)

Route53 now gives you the ability to balance request load by configuring a DNS record to return one of multiple possible answers according to some defined weighted round robin policy :-) Here is how one would setup three A records for the sub-domain www.xanthe.us with weights of 1, 1, and 3 (sum = 5). Route 53 will then select each of the first two resource record sets one-fifth of the time, and returns the third resource record set three-fifths of the time for all queries for www.xanthe.us. And how do we set this all up in Ylastic?

Yep. As simple as that. 

Enjoy :-)

Added a few more goodies to Ylastic for your Route 53 management pleasure.

• Wildcards for A records: Add wildcards to map all records in a domain to a single IP.

• Multiple IP addresses : Add multiple IP addresses to a single A record.

So, are you driving on Route 53 yet?

Three new features in Ylastic to make your Route 53 management even more easier.

• We now have customers that are importing large zone files with hundreds of resource records into Route 53. Ylastic added the ability to batch your changes so you can import even large zone files without running into the Route 53 limitation of 100 changes at a time. All you have to do is pick a zone file to import, and we will take care of all the chunkng and batching for the changes on our end. 
• Have lots of resource records in your zones, and feeling a bit overwhelmed with finding what you need? We have the fix for you. Search and filter through your records easily. Type a string to match and off you go.
• Ability to delete all resource records from a zone easily. This will only delete the records that you added or imported, and will not remove the Route 53 provided NS and SOA records. Oh yeah, we handle the batching of change requests, even if you are deleting more than 100 records.

Easy, peasy DNS management :-)

If you are thinking about migrating from your existing DNS provider to Route53 or just want to kick the tires on Route 53, Ylastic just added two features that will make the move a lot simpler and quicker.

• Import zone file data from your existing DNS provider into Route 53.
• Export zone data from Route 53 for backups, etc.

First the import. Here is my hosted zone with only the default NS and SOA records.

Select the Import Records button, paste the contents of your zone file and click import.

Your resource records will refresh and display the imported records.

The export is even easier. Just select the Export to Zone File button, and you will get all the records from your selected hosted zone in BIND zone file format.

Manage your DNS, the simple way!

AWS recently released a new service named Route 53 for managing the DNS for your domains. Ylastic now provides complete management for this new service. Route 53 introduces the concept of hosted zones which are collections of resource record sets for each domain you host with AWS. You can manage and configure all of the DNS information for each hosted zone by modifying the resource records for the zone. We have integrated support for Route 53 into our dashboard so you can manage your DNS along with a host of other infrastructure services from AWS in one unified interface.

• Create, update, delete hosted zones for your domains.
• Create, update, delete all types of resource records for a hosted zone.

Your DNS records are a crucial piece of the infrastructure puzzle, and misconfigured domains are a bit of a pain to debug, especially when changes are made to a working version rendering it unuseable. Ylastic gives you the ability to save and view changelogs for all changes made to a specific hosted zone. You can quickly view and review changes being made.

Ylastic also stores a complete audit trail for all the changes made to hosted zones and their associated resource records. You can go back and view a history which also includes the name of the user making the change as well as the IP address from where the change was made. You can use either a simple table based view or a graphical timeline based visualization of the audit trail.

We setup a domain while building and testing our Route 53 support, and it really was a breeze to setup the DNS. Kudos to AWS for a fantastic service. Here's a sample output from a DiG query for our hosted zone.

Enjoy your drive on Route 53 :-)