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No one's mentioned this as a potential use case, so wondering if other people have a way to solve a problem I have...we spin up EC2 instances on the fly for run

No one's mentioned this as a potential use case, so wondering if other people have a way to solve a problem I have...we spin up EC2 instances on the fly for running tests, but some of those require a dedicated IP address to deal with a vendor integration. Seems like a dedicated host might solve that, though perhaps not worth the cost. Is there some other way people solve this problem? We currently have an in-house box just for running those IP limited tests.

nathancahill 11y ago
Elastic IPs?
jeremyjh 11y ago
Yes - its called Elastic IP. You can have a dedicated IP address and associate it on-the-fly to regular EC2 instances. You pay a small monthly fee if you are not actively using it. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-ip-addresses-eip.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-i...
- nowarninglabel 11y ago
  The problem with Elastic IP, from my understanding, was that I often need to spin up say a dozen instances for a short period of time, but otherwise don't need the IPs, so it seemed it would end up costing to have those all available but only temporarily in use...though adding up the cost, it'd only be $45 a month (12 * 0.005 * 24 * 30) so perhaps that's not a big deal.
vacri 11y ago
Apart from the elastic IPs already mentioned, two more options: 1) Have a canned VPC-based test server that's off, and only turned on for the test. VPC-based servers do not lose their IP addresses between activations (though a single server may not suit you) 2) Use AWS internal DNS - have your vendor product use hostnames rather than IPs (if possible), and when you spin up the new machine for testing, switch it's IP into the hostname on the internal DNS zone. Again, you'll need to be VPC-based to use this. You can destroy the instance between runs with this method.
dcosson 11y ago
Alternatively you could set up a forward proxy server on its own instance with an elastic IP and proxy your network requests through it. This has the added benefit that if you ever need to spin up more instances to run simultaneously, you don't need to get a new whitelisted IP address.

nathancahill 11y ago

Elastic IPs?

jeremyjh 11y ago

Yes - its called Elastic IP. You can have a dedicated IP address and associate it on-the-fly to regular EC2 instances. You pay a small monthly fee if you are not actively using it. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-ip-addresses-eip.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-i...

nowarninglabel 11y ago
The problem with Elastic IP, from my understanding, was that I often need to spin up say a dozen instances for a short period of time, but otherwise don't need the IPs, so it seemed it would end up costing to have those all available but only temporarily in use...though adding up the cost, it'd only be $45 a month (12 * 0.005 * 24 * 30) so perhaps that's not a big deal.

vacri 11y ago

Apart from the elastic IPs already mentioned, two more options: 1) Have a canned VPC-based test server that's off, and only turned on for the test. VPC-based servers do not lose their IP addresses between activations (though a single server may not suit you) 2) Use AWS internal DNS - have your vendor product use hostnames rather than IPs (if possible), and when you spin up the new machine for testing, switch it's IP into the hostname on the internal DNS zone. Again, you'll need to be VPC-based to use this. You can destroy the instance between runs with this method.

dcosson 11y ago

Alternatively you could set up a forward proxy server on its own instance with an elastic IP and proxy your network requests through it. This has the added benefit that if you ever need to spin up more instances to run simultaneously, you don't need to get a new whitelisted IP address.