We’ve already shown in a previous blog post what a DNS is and how it works, and here we’ll show you what a modern DNS is, what its benefits are, and why it’s so important to successful businesses.
What Makes a DNS Modern?
It’s a fact the world doesn’t live without the internet – and that includes the DNS system. But a more sophisticated system provides a much better user experience, and when the DNS is on an edge computing platform, the benefits are even greater, because they are more powerful.
So, the answer to the question in our title “What Makes a DNS Modern” is simple: have its infrastructure on the edge.
Edge computing is the most modern and sophisticated technology to drive the hyperconnected economy. This is because, due to the edge’s proximity to users and the distribution of its elements, this implementation provides a series of advantages whose final result is, without a doubt, increased revenue for companies.
And Azion has exactly the best solution: Edge DNS, a modern DNS that has all the benefits of edge computing technology.
What Are the Edge’s Advantages?
There are numerous advantages that a DNS on the edge provides, but we have gathered the main ones here:
- Decentralization: With edge nodes highly distributed geographically, the edge network can embrace more territories and be present in more places compared to centralized cloud data centers.
- Low latency and lower bandwidth usage: Faster response as the trips to resolve requests are shorter.
- Resilience: Even when a node or a specific piece of equipment fails, the system continues to operate, using other network resources that guarantee its permanent availability.
- Scalability: The size of the network and the resources used can be adapted automatically according to demand, reducing costs related to provisioning or lack of resources.
- Virtualization: Resources can be virtualized at the edge through NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), reducing the need to manage physical structure and reducing costs.
- Orchestration: Developers are able to deploy, manage, control, monitor and update resources on the edge in real time with a zero-touch approach, as well as integrate other services.
- Automation: The use of SDN in edge locations facilitates the automation process, so developers just need to worry about creating and executing the code and workloads on the edge; no provisioning, no maintenance and NoOps.
- Observability: The edge computing model offers tools to track and monitor all the events and behaviors registered in the applications and networks. This allows the operators to get better business insights and understanding of their users.
- Security: The provider is able to create a plan that includes perimeter and multilayer security, using resources such as Web Application Firewall, Network Layer, and DDoS Protection.
- Open standards: Ideally, an edge computing platform should be compatible with different resources, languages, equipment, and can integrate third-party solutions.
- Serverless model: The provider runs and manages the servers and all the infrastructure, as well as the resources, abstracting scalability, capacity planning and maintenance operations from the developer or operator.
- Reduced operational costs: With fewer trips to the source infrastructure, the costs of using cloud services decrease.
- New use cases: Edge computing infrastructure facilitates project development with modern technology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, IoT, data and video streaming, 5G and more.
By having a DNS system in an edge computing network, much closer to the end users and their devices, the process is maximized as much as possible, because, in addition to what we mentioned previously, data processing at the edge of the network decreases the time between the request and the response of an IP address query, dramatically decreasing latency – and in the era of “time is money,” the milliseconds that the edge network reduces are literally synonymous with gains.
Benefits of a Modern DNS at the Edge
How to Have a Modern DNS System
Since speed, performance and security are critical business elements today, being ahead and prepared before an attack happens is the best strategy. For this, companies must equip themselves with modern tools with the best choice, both for business and customers. Furthermore, using DNS services on an edge computing platform will further enhance its velocity, performance, and protection.
If you want a system that combines high availability, scalability and security to replace an existing DNS service or to extend a primary DNS, the best solution is the Edge DNS, the authoritative server from Azion. This type of DNS is intelligent because it uses a redundant, highly distributed edge network to decrease request time and deliver high-speed network connections. Edge DNS technology allows the network to adapt to changes and outages as they occur, rerouting to not find downed servers and directly integrating with load balancing tools to optimize traffic.
Edge DNS: The Modern DNS from Azion
Azion Edge DNS is a domain hosting service that is part of Azion’s traffic routing solution. A data-oriented and programmable DNS service to ensure users and devices are routed to the best edge node.
By using Edge DNS, your domains will be hosted on Azion’s distributed infrastructure, using the same performance and security solutions built for other Azion products, combining techniques to optimize requests with protection against DDoS attacks.
Our Edge DNS is designed for those that want high performance and high availability for their hosting and their domain. Edge DNS is an authoritative DNS solution, and allows the customers to manage their domains, zones and records through a friendly and intuitive interface.
- Redirect Naked Domains: Quickly and reliably distribute traffic from naked domains so that”yourwebsite.com” can be redirected to “www.yourwebsite.com”.
- Scale Performance with Increasing Requests: With increasing website DNS requests, enhance the experience by boosting DNS performance.
- Stop Attacks Early: Protect users and your organization by adding protection early. Supplement security by adding Azion’s WAF.
The Edge DNS Goes Beyond Ordinary DNS Hosting
But why?
In addition to all the aforementioned benefits such as standards compliance (RFC), security, flexibility, reliability, performance and privacy, Edge DNS also offers the option to build policies within your dashboard, such as weighted routing policy.
Weighted routing allows numerous resources to be associated with a single domain name (for example, yourwebsite.com) or a subdomain name (blog.yourwebsite.com) and to choose how much traffic is directed to each resource. What weighted routing does benefits a variety of functionalities, including load balancing and testing new software versions (A/B).
Configuring the weighted routing is simple: create records with the same name and type for each of your resources and give each record a relative weight that corresponds to the amount of traffic you want to send for each resource. That’s it! The Edge DNS sends traffic to a resource based on the weight you assigned to the record as a proportion of the total weight for all records in the group.
How to Use Edge DNS
- Access Azion Console and click on the Products menu on the top-left corner.
- Select Edge DNS.
- Easily create your DNS zones and records.
- Modify your website to point to the new DNS.
- Sit back as we do the rest to increase performance and add a heightened layer of security to your website.
Check out in this video how fast and simple it is!
Don’t waste more time and money on legacy solutions. Learn more about our Edge DNS or talk to our experts here and find out why Azion is the best choice.
