Breaking things

For quite some time now, I’ve just always used the systems that were set into place before my time. Namely stuff to do with our AWS usage, so the RDS database and the EC2 instances. Over time I began to dabble with the EC2 product and learned a lot about services and how they work. But with RDS, all I really knew was that I was given an ip address (127.X.X.1) of a database, and was told that’s where the database lived.

So when issues arose (that’s for another post), I decided to upgrade the instance to give it more memory. I mean, the selling point of cloud is that everything is easily upgraded with a click of a button or a simple command. And that is very true. But what I learned the hard way was that using IP addresses with AWS is a bad thing to rely on. IP addresses are not static and can change, like when you upgrade instances. Instead, you should use the hostnames that AWS provides for you.

Lesson learned, use hostname and not IP address.