[aalbertson]

As a rule, NEVER EVER use CNAME's within AWS on Route53. You should always use their A Alias function. This provides near instant changes when you need to adjust a record. This only works on aws resources, but it is a great feature they built in.

[Total_Meltdown]

I totally agree. In these two specific cases, R53 + ELB wasn't going to work for us though, because of reasons. (I don't think I can go into specifics, but they're actual reasons.) Our workaround was reloading the configs (which triggers a DNS cache flush on both Nginx[1] and HAproxy[2]) once every couple of minutes.

I know, I know, I hate it too. We're working on it. Just wanted to share the workaround.

[1] http://wiki.nginx.org/CommandLine#Loading_a_New_Configuratio...

[2] http://www.mgoff.in/2010/04/18/haproxy-reloading-your-config...