4 Questions to Consider When Choosing an External DNS Provider

There are many reasons to switch to a managed DNS platform, but they all revolve around a central theme: When you reach a critical mass of traffic and start to worry about the performance and reliability of what you’re serving, it’s time to consider a managed DNS solution.

There are several well-known options, and to the uninitiated, they may initially seem relatively similar. All managed DNS providers offer a 100% uptime SLA through their global anycast DNS network. All have failover options to improve resiliency. They all provide dashboards and metrics so you can analyze performance. All are billed based on usage.

However, there are some important differences beneath these table stakes features. The approaches taken by different companies ultimately affect the performance, scale, and functionality of their networks. Before comparing your options, it’s important to know which of these features are important to you.

As you build your “must have” list, we’ve put together a few questions that can help you write your requirements list.

1. What is your risk profile?

Any managed DNS provider worth their salt offers a 100% uptime SLA. But that may not be enough. Network outages occur, and sometimes even highly resilient global networks face availability issues.

Having redundant failover options generally makes sense, especially for “always-on” services that really require high availability. In some cases, this means signing up with more than one provider. NS1 takes a different approach, providing separate, redundant systems that can be managed from the same control plane.

There is also a question: how Managed DNS providers actually provide elasticity. The mechanism for failover is important. Is it automated? Is customization possible? How many options are there? How easy is it to manage these options? Even the most robust redundant DNS option can be useless if the failover process fails.

2. What do developers need?

Most organizations begin using managed DNS solutions to improve the experience of their customers and end users. Then they discover that there is another audience. It’s the developer.

Today’s networks are driven by DevOps, edge computing, and serverless architectures, all of which require an API-first approach to infrastructure. Connectivity to tools like Terraform is a critical requirement for developers as they leverage network infrastructure to build customer-facing services.

When evaluating a managed DNS solution, it is important to investigate the breadth and depth of the API offering and connectivity to the standard tools used by developers. It is not enough for an API to simply be available; it must also be well-documented and easy to use.

3. How will you manage traffic between multiple CDNs and/or clouds?

If you have enough critical mass to need a managed DNS solution, at some point you will start using multiple clouds or CDNs to deliver your applications and content. This means distributing traffic across multiple providers to optimize performance and improve resiliency.

Although it is common for managed DNS providers to offer some form of traffic steering, there are significant differences in how they work. You’ll want to see how easy it is to enable traffic steering features in your managed DNS solution. How much manual work is required to configure and deploy?

It is also important to look at the ability to customize traffic coordination options. Can you achieve your desired target results using the available options? Or are your traffic steering options too thin to deliver the performance you really need? Do you want to use traffic shaping for basic load balancing and failover capabilities, or for deeper requirements?

4. How important is performance?

For most applications and services, the speeds of most managed DNS services are sufficient to get the job done. It doesn’t really matter if you’re a few milliseconds faster or slower than the average industry benchmark.

But in certain use cases, especially streaming video and gaming, those milliseconds can have a direct impact on your bottom line. In these cases, it is important to pay particular attention to network responsiveness and the depth of traffic steering options.

Most high-performance applications and services use multiple clouds and/or CDNs, so the ability to automatically steer traffic to the highest-performing service is important. You can also evaluate performance based on factors such as cost or reliability. This is another reason to prioritize solutions that include customizable traffic steering options.

If you’re serving content to Mainland China, your distribution region requires special attention to optimize performance. Your unique network architecture requires a locally existing managed DNS solution.

Learn more about IBM NS1 Connect’s managed DNS solution.