Internal DNS inside Amazon AWS VPC

Solution 1:

It seems from the AWS VPC documentation that the recommended approach to leveraging a DNS server inside of an AWS VPC is to first create a DHCP Options Set and associate it with the VPC. Then you can stand up 1-4 DNS servers in that VPC. Additionally, the DHCP Options Set will allow you to setup the following for all contained VPC instances. (snipped from the docs)

DHCP Option Name      | Description
 domain-name          |  A domain name of your choice (for example, example.com).
 domain-name-servers  |  The IP address of a domain name server.
 ntp-servers          |  The IP address of a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server. 
 netbios-name-servers |  The IP address of a NetBIOS name server.
 netbios-node-type    |  The NetBIOS node type (1, 2, 4, or 8).

Solution 2:

Instances should register their DNS names with your DNS servers via DDNS when they start (as CNAMEs to their public AWS-assigned FQDN); that way you can refer to them by well-known name and get the most appropriate address (internal or external) regardless of where you are. Route53 probably has this sort of magic built-in, but I prefer provider-independent solutions where possible.

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Solution 3:

Wouldn't something like Avahi work? This is even installed and nicely packaged for most Linux distributions. Just give each instance that needs to be reachable a unique hostname, and Bob's your uncle.