Hosts file and Testing deployment

My coWorkers and I were trying to determine a way to take a production system that isn't maintained under version control, and swap it out with the new system that needs to be deployed with as little downtime for the site as possible.

My idea was to use a subdomain of staging, perform all the neccesary migrations and tests, then flip flop the www domain with the staging and update the WordPress database URLs. Not a bad idea, and would give minimal downtime for sure.

The main problem was that the old system is a single server instance on media temple, while the new system was going to be one on Amazon, with an s3 bucket, RDS, and cloudfront cdn services. So there didn't seem to really be a way to 'test' the full system except by going live with it.

After some reflection one of my coWorkers had a brilliant idea. There's no need to update the DNS just to test the whole thing at all! Browsers can be tricked! So, it was as simple as pinging the load balancers public address, grabbing the ip from a ping. And then adding entries into the hosts file on our and the load-balancer systems to point the site's url to the ip of the load balancer.

So, what did that accomplish? Well, since the computer will check the hosts file first, the browser looks up the site's url, sees the host file first, and runs off to the ip address instead of asking a name server out on the internet for the address. By adding the CDN subdomains to the hosts file as well, the entire system can be tested, without actually switching hosts over! AND as an added bonus, the production site will continue to exist in maintenance mode for all to see like no giant awesome change is happening at all, until it's revealed!

That's some damn good trickery.