Hi All,
Well on our new site we are nearing the phase where we can do cloud failover. All our ansible scripts and nagios monitoring and such is nearing this point. That is if someone drives over the internet cable for Dunedin or the power fails to our suburb we auto-launch servers in the cloud and redirect things to them. This is not perfect in that we will be down for 5 minutes or so with current launch timings. But it is not too bad as a first cut at eliminating down time.
Now the question is for our New Zealand server we were thinking of using cloud flare as a front end. (They have a nice API whereby the failover servers can programatically change the DNS resolution of our name to point to the new cloud launched servers while the outage is occurring.)
We are going to be doing this on the live site of course. Just before we do this we will be buying another domain in NZ and trailing failover on that etc.. But before we start going around and buying extra domains and trying this I thought I would just ask the other experts, how does this all sound.
Using CloudFlare etc:
By using CloudFlares DNS outside NZ is this likely to significantly impact normal operations? (currently our domain registrar and DNS is severed by 1stdomains.) If so would there be better options around (I saw fastly mentioned here.)
Automated WebDriven Changes (Selenium, etc):
We could try and use something like Selenium to programatically log into the registration site and change our DNS record, but every so often someone like 1stdomains will change their web pages and things in a crunch will not work... we know this since some of our other non-critical selenium scrapings have suffered this problem... so that solution was ruled to be fairly unreliable for us... But at a pinch we could do this with Nagios checks to see that the rest of the page is working ok...
NZ registrants with API facilities:
Or does anyone know of NZ registrant who has an API which we can programatically change the DNS resolution with?
Thanks!
Jas