Edge Resiliency

Chapter 4. Managed DNS Services

A managed DNS solution might represent the best near-term strategy for protecting a business from the challenges that face today’s networks at the edge. In this chapter, we dive deeper into what benefits it can provide.

At a high level, we can define a managed DNS service as a service sourced through a specialized DNS service provider that enables users not only to manage DNS traffic, but also to access advanced features, including active failover, load balancing, dynamic IP addresses, and geographically targeted DNS.

Each managed DNS service provider brings its own value proposition to users looking for such services. We’ll explore some of the typical provider services later in this chapter. But first, it’s worth discussing where you can use traditional DNS services as a foundation for understanding what a managed DNS provider can offer.

Benefits of DNS

Some of the many uses to which organizations apply their DNS service include the following:

Performance

You can use geolocation load balancing for performance optimization; routing the request to the server closest either to the user edge or to the endpoint.

Cloud migration

Ratio load balancing allows for a gradual transition to the cloud; you can migrate some traffic to new cloud-hosted resources environments to test and validate access and then slowly move more traffic when ready.

Availability

Active failover allows you to establish a second endpoint or multiple alternate endpoints to which ...