[aidos]

Question for the more experienced in the group - is there a way of caching the DNS locally within you VPC in case something like this happens again? Or does that just cause more issues than it solves?

When I discovered it I tried switching my resolv.conf to 8.8.8.8 but of course none of my internal stuff worked because of how my security group / subnet / ip restrictions are setup internally.

[jlgaddis]

I'm not a big user of AWS but I don't know that there's anything stopping you from running your own recursive resolver (in your VPC) that your other machines use (instead of using an external resolver or whatever Amazon provides).

You could, for instance, stand up an instance or two running Unbound, forward to Amazon's own resolvers for internal stuff, and forward to external resolvers for external resolution (or just handle it yourself instead of using forwarders).

[tomekit]

The main reason to use AWS is so you don't need to do anything except calculate profit from your app, at least in theory. If you need to set up own resolvers or anything else within the AWS there is no reason to use AWS in the first place.

[chatmasta]

Yes, you can specify DNS server to use in the DHCP options set of the VPC. I've done this to point to internal DNS servers.