DevOps and DNS

Introduction

The nature and complexity of internet-based systems that are being developed and run are ever-changing, and the business pressure is for ever more frequent changes, higher throughput, and increased reliability. Whether business to consumer or business to business, web-based systems are ever more mission critical, and the market is moving so fast that it is essential for business that new features and fixes are deployed into production as quickly as possible.

These pressures have led to changes in the way we run systems, with teams needing to be more reactive and have understanding of much wider and more frequently changing systems than ever before.

A consequence has been the evolution of cultural changes such as the DevOps movement which aims to create a dynamic environment focused on improved team integration and communication, as well as techniques that drive frequent change and improve reliability.

DNS has long been the public face of the internet, allowing users to communicate with systems using friendly text-based names rather than IP addresses. However, it has traditionally been viewed as a relatively static resource with changes that are often manual and usually kept to a minimum.

This ability to hide the underlying implementation of systems behind common names is a feature that can be taken advantage of in order to implement the type of dynamic and flexible systems that a DevOps culture provides.

In many ways, DNS could be described as the glue that holds ...