Feature request: list of running ALLOC_IDs via DNS

It would be incredibly handy to be able to list the ALLOC_IDs of running apps via DNS.

Currently, you can get the public IPv6 addresses of all running VMs in an app via dig global.<appname>.internal AAAA. However, there’s no way to list the Allocation IDs of running instances via DNS.

This would be helpful for certain apps (e.g. CockroachDB is much friendlier with hostnames than raw addresses) because then you could list them and compose them into <alloc_id>.vm.<appname>.internal addresses.

For example: dig global.<appname>.internal TXT could list the Allication IDs, seperated by commas (similar to what happens now with regions.<appname>.internal

Hi @mcfadyeni

There is something like that which might be what you’re after but it would require a bit of processing.

vms.<appname>.internal is a TXT record that contains a comma separated list of each VM’s alloc_id, region, and a third code (which I’m unsure about what it represents, maybe stands for datacenter).
e.g. "11112222 syd dc,33334444 nrt dc,55556666 yyz dc"

3 Likes

Yeah, this would be my default answer to making allocids available in DNS — you’re going to have to parse DNS either way, so you might as well parse this. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Oh wow, didn’t know this! This works perfectly for what I’m doing, thank you! :smile:

I’ll PR the docs to add this if that’s alright? Or is it undocumented for a reason?

Did you get around to sending the PR? If so, I’ll close the one I just sent: Add missing entry for vm.appname.internal by ignoramous · Pull Request #309 · superfly/docs · GitHub

No I didn’t get around to it, thanks for submitting that!