I've been watching this come together for awhile now - Aerostat's a pretty cool little service for managing a cluster.

Rather than relying on a custom internal DNS implementation, Aerostat automatically names servers as they are added to a cluster based on the service they provide, then replicates these names across all nodes in the cluster. This process ensures that all nodes are aware of a new service in under a minute. It also solves the "swiss cheese" problem of instances named cass-00, cass-01, cass-02 and so on by filling in gaps as nodes are added and removed.

For those in the Portland area who are interested, Gavin will probably be giving a talk on this at PDXDevops sometime soon.

I definitely just finished hacking on this problem for our deployment and this is a much better solution. Docs look great too.

"That one looks like a bunny! I'll call him Fluffy."