What is managed DNS?

Managed DNS is where a third party hosts and optimizes your DNS resolution architecture to provide the fastest, most secure, and most reliable environment.

Perhaps the easiest way to explain this is to look at the opposite scenario. don’t Do you have a managed DNS service in place?

All queries in the Domain Name System (DNS) follow the same logic to resolve IP addresses. If a DNS record for a site is not found in the local cache, DNS incrementally queries a series of servers until it finds the correct answer from the authoritative DNS server associated with that domain.

If you run a website without a managed DNS solution, this means that you are responsible for answering all authoritative DNS queries from around the world yourself. Although it is certainly possible to manage your own authoritative DNS, there are some risks.

• effectiveness: DNS traffic patterns are highly variable and often unpredictable. To directly respond to all queries to your domain, you need sufficient capacity to handle sudden volume spikes. This typically requires sophisticated load balancing and failover systems.
• security: Managing your own DNS means you need to be able to respond to all these queries in the event of a Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. If there is no capacity, the site will go down. To mitigate the impact of a DDoS attack, your DNS infrastructure needs the ability to absorb all incoming queries.
• Performance: DNS queries can come from anywhere in the world. To deliver the type of site performance every user expects, you need to provide answers within milliseconds. Internet queries can only travel very quickly, so a worldwide network of servers (called “points of presence”) are required to provide “standard” site performance. These networks provide answers to DNS queries on a large scale. This is a significant investment for most businesses.
• expense: It is possible to provide your own DNS with sufficient availability, security, and performance to get the job done. But for most organizations, it’s not worth doing on its own. Building a global data center network with sufficient capacity, security, and resiliency to meet today’s Internet demands requires significant investments in both equipment and personnel.

Table Stakes: What Every Managed DNS Product Offers

Managed DNS providers provide the high-availability, secure systems that organizations need to deliver peak performance at a fraction of the cost of building their own DNS resolution network.

Since the early 2000s, managed DNS providers have provided standardized services for organizations that do not wish to host their own authoritative DNS. Smaller organizations often purchased basic managed DNS services through the domain registration process, while larger organizations looked to premium providers with more specific domain expertise.

It goes without saying that all premium managed DNS service offerings today offer 100% uptime via a global anycast DNS network. These systems are highly resilient and redundant, and feature a robust DNS failover architecture to keep your site up and running. All managed DNS platforms provide a control panel, dashboard, and metrics so you can analyze performance over time and improve resiliency by removing compromised endpoints.

Pricing for premium managed DNS products is also fairly standardized and straightforward depending on the provider. In most cases, it’s usage-based, so customers pay only for what they use, not for capacity.

The next evolution of managed DNS

Managed DNS continues to evolve, adding advanced features to the basic value of a continuously operating, performance-driven DNS service. For anyone considering a managed DNS service, here are some additional features to consider: Some of these features are for advanced users, but will become more common over time.

traffic management: Managed DNS now goes beyond basic load balancing to optimize performance, control costs, and deliver an optimal application experience. The power of IBM® NS1 Connect® Filter Chain (GG1) technology optimizes DNS routing decisions based on specific use cases.

Infrastructure as code: Today’s networks are based on DevOps, edge computing, and serverless architectures that require an API-first approach to infrastructure. NS1 turns DNS into an enabler for these systems rather than a blocker through a REST API with an easy-to-use, pre-configured architecture. Integration with tools like Terraform makes it easier to connect to existing systems.

Dedicated DNS: Some organizations want to outsource their DNS externally while also putting in extra effort to protect their DNS from large-scale outages. NS1 provides an additional layer of protection by providing dedicated, physically and logically separate DNS services for these customers.

data driven: Real-time analytics dramatically improves the performance and responsiveness of today’s managed DNS products. NS1 Connect provides advanced traffic shaping capabilities that use application data to determine the best routing at any given time and for specific application types. As a result, waiting times are significantly reduced.

Performance in China: Delivering a high-quality application experience to mainland Chinese users presents unique challenges. To overcome the DNS latency impacts associated with the unique architecture of the Chinese Internet, NS1 provides professional managed DNS services for customers in mainland China.

Learn more about IBM NS1 Connect