How to automatically remove a dead node from RabbitMQ cluster
Consider using the rabbitmq/rabbitmq-autocluster plugin:


  A RabbitMQ plugin that clusters nodes automatically using a number of peer discovery mechanisms:
  
  
  Consul,
  etcd2
  DNS A records
  AWS EC2 tags
  AWS Autoscaling Groups
  


There is a fair bit of configuration to plug in to get this setup including setting IAM policies and adding EC2 tags to the instances you want to be party to your cluster.

If you were to use AWS Autoscaling Groups then you would add the following to your rabbitmq.config:

[
  {rabbit, [ ... ]},
  {autocluster, [
    {backend, aws},
    {aws_autoscaling, true},
    {aws_ec2_region, "us-west-2"}
  ]}
].


If you are not using AWS Autoscaling Groups you can still achieve the desired result using tags on your EC2 Instances:

[
  {rabbit, [ ... ]},
  {autocluster, [
    {backend, aws},
    {aws_ec2_tags, [{"region", "us-west-2"}, {"service", "rabbitmq"}]},
    {aws_ec2_region, "us-east-1"},
    {aws_access_key, "..."},
    {aws_secret_key, "..."}
  ]}
].


With all of that said I strongly recommend using Consul by HashiCorp as your service discovery mechanism, in the long run, you get significantly more flexibility in terms of decoupling your parts of your system from each other.