Distributed development staff needing a common IP range
- by bakasan
I work on a development staff that is geographically distributed, mostly all throughout the state of CA, but several key members also must travel frequently.
We rely quite heavily on a 3rd party provider API for a great deal of our subsystems (can't get into who it is or what they do). The 3rd party however is quite stringent on network access and have no notion of a development sandbox. Access is restricted to 2, 3 IP numbers and that's about it. Once we account for our production servers, that leaves us with an IP or two to spare for our dev team--which is still problematic as people's home IP changes, people travel, we have more than 2 devs, etc.
Wide IP blocks are not permitted by the 3rd party. Nor will they allow dynamic DNS type services. There is no simple console to swap IPs on the fly either (e.g. if a dev's IP at home changes or they are on the road).
As none of us are deep network experts, I'm wondering what our viable options are?
Are there such things as 3rd party hosts to VPNs? Generally I think of a VPN as a mechanism to gain access to a home office, but the notion would be a 3rd party VPN that we'd all connect to and we'd register this as an IP origin w/ our 3rd party.
We've considered using Amazon EC2 to effectively host a dev environment for each dev and using that to connect. Amazon only gives you so many static IPs however (I believe 5?) so this would only be a stop gap solution until our team size out strips our IP count at Amazon.
Those were the only viable thoughts that I had, but again, I'm far from a networking guy. Tried searching for similar threads, but I'm not even sure I know the right vernacular to look around for.
