How can one domain route to an always-changing pool of servers?

Posted by ryeguy on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by ryeguy
Published on 2010-12-22T19:26:54Z Indexed on 2010/12/22 19:56 UTC
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dns

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load-balancing

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cloud-computing

I'm sure this is an easy solution, I'm just not too familiar with how DNS works or if that's even related to this problem.

If I'm running a web service on amazon ec2, distributed across many instances, how can I make it so a single domain name can be used to access the entire pool of servers, which will be changing from time to time?

Since the instances may be present one second but gone the next (and vice versa), I need a way to randomly pick an active member of the cluster to route to. The updates would have to be instantaneous. Is this even possible, with dns caching and all?

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