The case for separating DNS from your CDN 

Should you’re signing on with a content material supply community (CDN) supplier, you’ll most likely see DNS as a part of the usual service bundle. It’s solely pure—to entry your content material delivered by the CDN, the Web has to know the place to ship the visitors. CDNs make it straightforward to configure and handle these DNS settings. 

It’s straightforward to just accept DNS providers as a part of a CDN bundle. Most organizations which are simply beginning out with a CDN most likely don’t give DNS a second thought. They simply assume that the 2 providers ought to naturally go collectively. 

From a administration perspective, co-location of DNS inside a content material supply service actually is smart. The flexibility to configure and handle DNS alongside different CDN settings saves a little bit little bit of effort and time, and who doesn’t wish to save effort and time? 

Right here’s the difficulty: that seemingly minor DNS characteristic truly has a major influence on how a lot you pay for content material supply, the standard of what you ship and the resilience of what you’re delivering. Even that ease of use argument will get flipped on its head. 

We’re greater than a little bit biased right here, however that’s as a result of we imagine that for a lot of CDN customers the case for utilizing a separate DNS service is overwhelming. 

All of it boils right down to this: if you happen to’re utilizing a number of CDNs now or see your self utilizing a number of CDNs sooner or later, you’ll wish to keep away from getting locked right into a single supplier’s ecosystem and value construction. Doing this successfully requires a separate DNS system that works throughout suppliers, permitting you to select the best choice at any explicit second. 

Let’s take a look at among the advantages of utilizing an unbiased DNS supplier, together with: 

• value 
• efficiency 
• ease of administration 

Value 

The DNS providing that comes bundled with CDN providers has one job: to make that CDN stickier. They make it potential to steer visitors elsewhere utilizing DNS, nevertheless it’s not precisely within the CDN’s curiosity to ship you wherever else—they solely receives a commission once they’re delivering your content material, in any case. 

The price of content material supply varies enormously throughout totally different ISPs and geographical areas. The CDNs don’t use this knowledge to optimize visitors as it could influence their backside line. 

Whereas the price variations can appear miniscule for particular person queries, while you multiply these by the variety of queries world wide and take a look at it over time, the full provides up rapidly. The ability to steer traffic to the bottom value CDN utilizing DNS can find yourself saving you quite a bit. 

Efficiency 

Simply as the price of content material supply can change from second to second, there are important variations in efficiency between CDNs. Right here’s a random pattern of actual person monitoring knowledge from among the main content material supply suppliers. 

As you’ll be able to see, the information is everywhere. At any given cut-off date, varied CDNs may ship considerably higher (or worse) efficiency. 

Should you’re utilizing the default DNS that comes together with your CDN, it’s very tough to change to a greater performing CDN in actual time. Doing that will require each the data of which CDN is the best choice and the power to quickly configure DNS to steer visitors between suppliers. CDN suppliers don’t present that knowledge. 

Resilience 

Any CDN value its salt has a 100% uptime SLA. Even so, outages are inevitable and extra frequent than the suppliers care to confess. (Monday.com has a superb piece about this.) 

When these outages happen, your content material will go offline if you happen to don’t have a strategy to simply fail over to a unique service. As a result of the DNS that comes bundled with CDN packages is just designed to ship visitors to 1 place, it could actually depart you with out many choices when that one place goes darkish. 

Utilizing an external DNS provider offers you the power to routinely change from one CDN to a different within the occasion of an outage, protecting your content material on-line and the income flowing. 

Administration 

Keep in mind at the start after we stated that managing your DNS settings from inside a CDN platform can prevent some effort and time? That’s true, however provided that you’re solely utilizing one CDN. 

Should you’re utilizing a number of CDNs, nevertheless, managing DNS could be a large trouble. Any time you wish to shift visitors between suppliers, it’s important to go into every platform and manually reconfigure all of it. And let’s face it: no one needs to try this. Separate DNS configuration steps normally signifies that solely a significant change prompts any shift in wherever visitors goes. That’s how the CDN suppliers prefer it. 

The advantages of a separate DNS layer 

Should you’re utilizing a number of CDNs, separating out the DNS layer helps you optimize for the perfect of every supplier via the magic of visitors steering. 

Need to optimize for value? A DNS supplier that sits aside out of your CDNs can analyze the information in actual time and routinely steer visitors to the most affordable choice for that specific second. 

Need to optimize for efficiency? Evaluation of geographies, ISPs, gadgets and different elements may be fed into an automatic DNS logic, which sends customers to the perfect CDN out there. 

Need to hold your content material on-line within the face of periodic outages? Dedicated DNS providers can routinely fail over to whichever CDN is up and working at that second, providing seamless content material supply throughout suppliers. 

Need to save time on DNS administration? Utilizing a single, absolutely automated DNS management aircraft throughout CDNs offers you the ability to make mandatory modifications with out the annoyance of handbook configurations. 

Evidently, NS1 is designed to do all of this and extra. We leverage the ability of DNS so among the greatest, most consequential content material platforms on the market can ship the bottom value, best-performing, most resilient, best to handle operations out there. Our advanced traffic steering options make all of it potential. 

Learn more about application traffic optimization with IBM NS1 Connect®