The Importance of DNS and the Move to ‘Cloud-Native’

By Oliver Michler, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Open-Xchange

DNS is one of the backbones of the internet, so needs to be rock-solid, in terms of reliability, performance and scalability, and PowerDNS has been a huge part of making that happen for the past 20 years.

However, DNS is often seen as something that, although critical, is not affected by shifts in technology or business practices, so hasn’t evolved in terms of features.

That’s simply not true; DNS software has changed hugely in recent years, driven by a number of factors, including new work in the IETF to defined standards (particularly around privacy and encryption), infrastructure and subscriber security features and changes in the way businesses and consumers use the internet, which has placed ever-higher loads on DNS.

Coupled with this is the move away from physical to virtualized infrastructure using virtualized network function (VNF), managing VNF software appliances on virtualized infrastructure with the help of network function virtualization (NFV) and then, more recently, the move from virtualized to ‘cloud-native’ infrastructure.

Moving to a cloud-native approach offers a range of benefits, including:

• Faster time-to-market – Deploying and managing the infrastructure to run services is labor intensive and time-consuming; multiple teams run different aspects of the infrastructure, from networking, to storage and security etc., not to mention the disconnect between packaged software and the infrastructure that it runs on. Moving to cloud-native technologies eliminates many of these boundaries; for example, many businesses have used cloud technologies (whether public or private) to launch services at speeds that were previously unthinkable.
   
• Reduced costs – Cloud technologies have helped to revolutionize the way infrastructure is provided and, companies using orchestration software such as Kubernetes, are able to completely automate the deployment and lifecycle management of the applications and services they run, which leads to enormous cost savings.
   
• Increased extensibility and scalability – Cloud-native helps to move away from monolithic applications and services to loosely coupled microservices. This has huge advantages for extensibility, as each component can be upgraded and replaced individually. It also greatly improves scalability, since each microservice can be scaled individually (which also helps reduce costs).

These benefits also apply to DNS and allow providers to better cope with the ever-growing demands on recursive DNS traffic.

As a result, our fully cloud-native version of PowerDNS will launch later this year. PowerDNS Cloud Control will integrate with core technologies for containerization, orchestration, monitoring and alerting, and configuration and operations, providing network operators with the tools to adjust their DNS service according to current market needs.

You can find more about our approach in our cloud-native PowerDNS whitepaper. Stay tuned –  we’ll provide more information on PowerDNS Cloud Control soon!