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Gerhard Jacobs
Posted by
Gerhard Jacobs on
January 28, 2019

Report: 5 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With DNS

As a door to nearly every app and website on the Internet, DNS is a great place to apply traffic management policies.  The capabilities of most Managed DNS platforms, however, are severely limited, because they were never designed with today’s apps in mind.

Most managed DNS platforms are built on off-the-shelf software with features like monitoring and geo-IP databases grafted on after the fact. Traditionally, state of the art DNS platforms would do two things that started moving into the realm of traffic management: they wouldn’t send users to a server that was down, and they’d try to return the IP address of the server that’s closest to the end-user making a request. 

Kinda like using a GPS unit from 1999 to get to a gas station: it can give you the location of one that’s close by and maybe open according to its Yellow Pages listing, but that’s about it. What if there’s road work or congestion on one of the routes you can take to get there. Maybe they’re out of diesel, or perhaps they’re open but backed up with lines stretching around the block. Perhaps a gas station that’s a bit further off would have been a better choice?

High-performing Internet properties face similar challenges in digital form and they go far beyond proximity and the binary notion of “up.” Does the datacenter have excess capacity? What’s traffic like getting there is there a fiber cut or congestion to a particular ISP we should route around? Are there any data privacy or protection protocols we need to take into account?

Enter next-generation DNS; empowering you to structure traffic management based on your business needs, and in ways not previously possible.

Case in point: Cloud burst! NS1 can leverage ready-to-scale infrastructure to handle planned or unplanned traffic spikes. If your primary colocation environment becomes overloaded, we can dynamically send new traffic to another environment according to your business rules, whether it’s AWS, your next nearest facility, or a DR/failover site.

Keen to learn more, read our report on the 5 things you didn't know you could do with DNS.