As global networks continue to expand and evolve, ensuring optimal reliability becomes increasingly crucial. One area that often falls under the radar yet holds significant importance in this narrative is DNS hosting. Typically, most setups use a single provider for DNS hosting. While this is the most common and easy-to-use setup, it poses a substantial risk of becoming a single failure point.
DNS, or the Domain Name System, is often termed as the phonebook of the internet. Its cardinal role and potential negative impact of DNS outages cannot be overstated. This is particularly concerning in today’s multi-tenant cloud computing environments. As multiple entities share the underlying DNS infrastructure, the impact of any outages is multiplied, making it an Achilles heel for businesses online suitability.
A multi-provider DNS deployment offers solid immunity against such eventualities, taking full advantage of the zone transfer capability imbibed in the DNS protocol (RFC 5936). However, several cloud providers do not proffer direct support for this capability. That’s where the idea of “reflection” comes into play. This approach ensures that updates to DNS are reflected in both providers, commonly done by tweaking the CI/CD pipelines.
Notwithstanding its apparent advantages, multi-provider DNS setups remain underutilized, primarily due to their operationally heavy and error-prone nature. Managing and maintaining multiple providers necessitates manual intervention, leading to errors, inconsistencies and hence, service interruptions.
With the advent of Terraform scripts, these operational issues can be consigned to history. The new Terraform scripts ensure that any changes are automatically picked up and reflected on another provider, allowing the user to continue updating a single provider. The script does the manual heavy-lifting, auto-generating the required data for the other provider.
Furthermore, the solution opens doors to an array of benefits, such as creating new “Managed zones” in Cloud DNS and transferring updates to the corresponding DNS zone without the need for overhauling existing CI/CD pipelines.
One can adopt two distinct approaches with this infrastructure:
The Dual-provider in an active-active setup: Here, both providers act as primary, each configured with appropriate DNS nameservers for your domain. This ensures a fallback option if one goes down.
The Dual-provider in an active-passive setup: This approach is suitable for those with an existing centralized DNS management system. You simply add Cloud DNS as a secondary DNS provider.
To get these setups up and running collaboration with the registrar to publish updated NS records is crucial as the resolvers keep track of the health status of the nameservers they use.
Launching into 2023, an emphasis on digital resilience and reliability should be at the forefront of every internet and cloud service provider’s strategy. Leveraging multi-provider DNS setups, paired with breakthrough Terraform scripts, should be a much-explored arena. While the journey may sound complex, its benefits in delivering enhanced reliability and near-failsafe solutions make it an exciting, worthwhile venture.
Industry professionals, tech enthusiasts, and developers alike should explore and capitalize on these recent developments to improve the viability and reliability of their services. It’s time to tap into the potential of the multi-provider approach and use Terraform scripts as the stepping stone for a resilient digital future.
Up until working with Casey, we had only had poor to mediocre experiences outsourcing work to agencies. Casey & the team at CJ&CO are the exception to the rule.
Communication was beyond great, his understanding of our vision was phenomenal, and instead of needing babysitting like the other agencies we worked with, he was not only completely dependable but also gave us sound suggestions on how to get better results, at the risk of us not needing him for the initial job we requested (absolute gem).
This has truly been the first time we worked with someone outside of our business that quickly grasped our vision, and that I could completely forget about and would still deliver above expectations.
I honestly can’t wait to work in many more projects together!
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