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I would like to use a private DNS (Route53 in our case) in order to map hosts to EC2 instance private IP addresse. The hosted zone we are using for testing is not declared in any registrar (company-test.com.).

There are different servers (Nagios, Puppet, ActiveMQ ...) all hosted in ec2, that means their IP can change over time (restart, new instance launch...). That would be great if I can use DNS instead of clients' /etc/hosts for mapping private IP/internal domain name...

The ActiveMQ server url is activemq.company-test.com and it maps to (A record) private IP address of the AMQ server. This url is only reachable by other ec2 owned by the same aws account.

My question is how to configure ec2 instances so they could reach the ActiveMQ server WITHOUT having to buy a new domain company-test.com ?

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Is $8 really that big of a burden? –  ceejayoz Oct 5 '12 at 15:34
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I'm not entirely clear on what you want to do (probably because my experience with Amazon's family of web-service wizardry is relatively limited), but my suggestion would be to create a subdomain (like testing.company.com) and delegate that off to Route53.

You already own company.com, so there's no additional cost associated with spinning off the subdomain, and it neatly confines your testing environment while still maintaining a sane DNS hierarchy ("testing" lives under the company's domain). Similar logic works well for splitting off a testing AD domain if such things are relevant to your use case).

(What I'm not clear on is if you want your test zone to be publicly visible or not -- I don't think there's a way to have a "private" Route53 domain that's not visible outside your company: The whole point seems to be to publish a public DNS record that maps back into your EC2 universe's dynamic IP space. I could be misunderstanding that though, or completely wrong for other reasons...)

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