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Transforming Network Services with F5 Cloud DNS – Primary DNS Service

Calvin Rowland Thumbnail
Calvin Rowland
Published December 07, 2020
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When we launched F5 Cloud Services over a year and half ago, we shared our mission to deliver a set of SaaS-based application security, delivery, and insight solutions optimized for today’s modern, cloud-native apps. Since then, our portfolio of easily provisioned and configured services has grown, and we are very excited to announce the preview of our newest solution: F5 Cloud DNS – Primary DNS service. There has been tremendous interest from customers already using F5’s cloud-based secondary DNS and global load balancer service solutions. With this preview launch, we are fulfilling another sought after request—the ability to easily and fully manage their DNS infrastructure with F5.

Why are customers asking for this? Let’s look at important developments in application and networking infrastructure. It’s not news to anyone that businesses today are focused on boosting IT efficiency and agility. Our own research indicates that 87% of organizations employ a multi-cloud approach, while a separate study points out that 60% of surveyed CIOs have found their organization’s tech debt rising noticeably over the past three years.

Meanwhile, the DevOps movement has developed in part to address these challenges—and in the process is reshaping entire industries. Unlike infrequent big-bang releases, enterprises are adopting continuous integration/continuous delivery practices, resulting in dramatic improvements in release cycles and the experiences they deliver to their customers.   

Given DNS is a foundational networking service, it’s not a stretch to claim that digital transformation begins with DNS. Unfortunately, DNS is the last frontier of networking technology modernization. F5 Cloud DNS Service empowers network operations teams and DevOps teams to take advantage of these tectonic shifts in culture (DevOps) and technology (elastic consumption of computing and networking infrastructure).

Figure 1: Populated Zones

Benefits of F5 Cloud DNS – Primary DNS Service

F5 Cloud DNS service delivers on our mission to enable adaptive applications by allowing you to grow, shrink, or protect the primary DNS that supports all your applications. Here are the key benefits:

Simplicity & Speed in DNS deployment: You can quickly provision and configure DNS services within a few clicks using a slick GUI and begin responding to queries within minutes of activation.

Support for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments: F5 Cloud DNS – Primary DNS Service supports applications hosted on any public cloud or private cloud environment.

Global availability: This service is built-on a global Anycast network to provide highly available and responsive DNS in any location. By routing queries to the nearest available F5 Cloud DNS location, latency is reduced and applications experience a performance boost.

Instant scalability: This service automatically scales to respond to large query volumes without manual intervention. Dynamic auto-scaling allows enterprises to handle sudden surges in demand instantly.

Layers of Security: Dynamic security with automatic failover, built-in DDoS protection, and TSIG authentication maintains application availability.

Drive automation and DevOps integration using APIs: You can automate DNS services using declarative APIs. Automation helps reduce manual errors and enables you to achieve a consistent, repeatable configuration across different environments. Why is a consistent configuration environment important? Using a standard template minimizes the time needed to deploy and provision DNS. It also enables NetOps teams to reproduce any issues quickly and troubleshoot rapidly.

Figure 2: UI to Add Resource Record

For DevOps teams, APIs for DNS services enable:

  • DevOps teams to integrate DNS into their CI/CD pipelines. The elastic nature of the cloud coupled programmable APIs enables DevOps teams to deploy apps faster and spin up or spin down DNS services for their test, dev, and sandbox environments, ultimately speeding up innovation.
  • DevOps self-service – DevOps doesn’t have to rely on network operations teams to provide DNS services for modern, cloud-native apps, and Network Operations teams retain control over enterprise-wide DNS management for business-critical applications.
Figure 3: Primary DNS Dashboard indicating Zone Status

Our Cloud DNS services also allow requests and data for your apps to be maintained within specific regions to comply with GDPR. F5 Cloud DNS provides a solution for global routing for all your web traffic to optimize performance and failover at a global scale.

We keenly look forward to your participation in this preview by signing up for F5 Cloud Services here. Your feedback would be invaluable in shaping the future of this solution.