DevOps and DNS

Chapter 6. DNS and DevOps: A Real-World Example

The final chapter of this book will illustrate how we use DNS within the DevOps culture that we have at my own company, Intechnica, to ensure that we are optimizing deployments and minimizing risk when running our TrafficDefender product.

TrafficDefender is a feature-rich traffic management system that sits in front of websites, routing traffic back to the origin servers. This is a completely cloud-hosted service.

DNS plays a core part in how we manage, distribute, and mitigate risk with the product.

All this is made possible because we use a DNS provider that has an API that allows for frequent changes to be made, and those changes are very quickly propagated through the internet.

Operations Culture at Intechnica

We have a DevOps culture. Our mindset is focused on getting small changes out often, and as such, all infrastructure creation and deployment needs to be fully automated and repeatable. As everything is cloud-based, this approach is much easier.

The rate of change, as well as the mission-critical nature of the system, mean that we have to have a large body of active monitoring. However, seeing as we run everything in the cloud, we have only minimal control over the infrastructure and therefore are reliant on the monitoring data to indicate when problems arise and then react to them as needed.

DNS as a Means of Distribution

When users sign up to our product, they are given a URL as an endpoint. This is their only means ...