Mike Staszel

I had a hard time figuring out how to make a Go program execute a command and make that program take over the console. I wanted my program to launch an SSH session.

I recently started working on a tool to help me SSH into EC2 instances (more details coming in a future blog post). The goal was to automatically open up an SSH session into an EC2 instance.

It’s easy to execute a program like ssh but the input and output of that program is lost. After trying to figure it out — I had a realization — this was easy! Truly one of those moments where it’s obvious once you see it.

Recently I ran into a problem while working with Amazon EC2 servers. Servers without dedicated elastic IP addresses would get a different IP address every time they were started up! This proved to be a challenge when trying to SSH in to the servers.

How can I have a dynamic domain name that always points to my EC2 server?

Amazon’s Route53 came to mind. Route53, however, does not have a simple way to point a subdomain directly to an EC2 instance. You can set up load balancers between Route53 and your instance, but that’s a hassle. You can also set up an elaborate private network with port forwarding — yuck.