Last night just as I was struggling to figure out which project I would work on this week I saw a post on Hacker News regarding Amazon's latest web services offering. Route 53 offers programmatic control of Amazon's globally based DNS service designed for a high volume of queries. At $1/domain/month with additional charges for high query volume it's questionable whether this service will take off for the general consumer market given that most domain registrars provide DNS for free already. However in the professional market where the needs for highly configurable, low TTL, low latency DNS services is necessary Route 53 could be a contender.

As the service was just released it doesn't have a generally usable front end. The getting started documentation has the user editing XML files to begin using the service. I'm uncertain if this is a deliberate attempt by Amazon to get the developer community to build the tools to interact with the service or just a function of the product being in beta mode still. Regardless I'm taking the bait.

Project Summary: Create an interface for Route 53

Features:

• Ruby Gem based
• Command Line Interface
• Easy to Use Programmatic Control
• Simple web front end

Edit: Early prototype of a ruby library for Amazon's Route 53 is now available

Edit 2: No longer a prototype http://blog.50projects.com/2010/12/amazon-route-53-interface-friday.html