Amazon EC2 autoscaling instances with elastic IPs
amazon-ec2, amazon-web-services, autoscaling
Solution
You can associate an Elastic IP to ASG instances using manual or scripted API calls just as you would any other instance -- however, there is no automated way to do this. ASG instances are designed to be ephemeral/disposable, and Elastic IP association goes against this philosophy.
To solve your problem re: whitelisting, you have a few options:
- If the system that requires predictable source IPs is on EC2 and under your control, you can disable IP restrictions and use EC2 security groups to secure traffic instead
- If the system is not under your control, you can set up a proxy server with an Elastic IP and have your ASG instances use the proxy for outbound traffic
- You can use http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ to gain complete control over instance addressing, including network egress IPs -- though this can be time consuming
Problem
Is there any way to make new instances added to an autoscaling group associate with an elastic IP? I have a use case where the instances in my autoscale group need to be whitelisted on remote servers, so they need to have predictable IPs. I realize there are ways to do this programmatically using the API, but I'm wondering if there's any other way. It seems like CloudFormation may be able to do this.