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 package deal. 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 simply accept DNS companies as a part of a CDN package deal. Most organizations which are simply beginning out with a CDN most likely don’t give DNS a second thought. They only assume that the 2 companies ought to naturally go collectively. 

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

Right here’s the difficulty: that seemingly minor DNS function really has a big 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 somewhat biased right here, however that’s as a result of we consider 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 need to keep away from getting locked right into a single supplier’s ecosystem and price construction. Doing this successfully requires a separate DNS system that works throughout suppliers, permitting you to choose the best choice at any explicit second. 

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

• price 
• efficiency 
• ease of administration 

Price 

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

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

Whereas the fee variations can appear miniscule for particular person queries, while you multiply these by the variety of queries all over the world and take a look at it over time, the whole provides up shortly. The ability to steer traffic to the bottom price CDN utilizing DNS can find yourself saving you rather a lot. 

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 consumer monitoring information from among the main content material supply suppliers. 

As you possibly can see, the information is in all places. 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 modify to a greater performing CDN in actual time. Doing that may require each the data of which CDN is the best choice and the flexibility to quickly configure DNS to steer visitors between suppliers. CDN suppliers don’t present that information. 

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 wonderful piece about this.) 

When these outages happen, your content material will go offline if you happen to don’t have a approach 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 at least one place, it may well depart you with out many choices when that one place goes darkish. 

Utilizing an external DNS provider offers you the flexibility to robotically swap from one CDN to a different within the occasion of an outage, retaining your content material on-line and the income flowing. 

Administration 

Keep in mind firstly after we mentioned 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 is usually a huge problem. Any time you need to shift visitors between suppliers, you must go into every platform and manually reconfigure all of it. And let’s face it: no person needs to do this. Separate DNS configuration steps often signifies that solely a serious 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 most effective of every supplier by means of the magic of visitors steering. 

Wish to optimize for price? A DNS supplier that sits aside out of your CDNs can analyze the information in actual time and robotically steer visitors to the most affordable possibility for that specific second. 

Wish to optimize for efficiency? Evaluation of geographies, ISPs, units and different elements might be fed into an automatic DNS logic, which sends customers to the most effective CDN accessible. 

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

Wish to save time on DNS administration? Utilizing a single, totally automated DNS management airplane throughout CDNs offers you the ability to make essential 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 price, best-performing, most resilient, best to handle operations accessible. Our advanced traffic steering options make all of it potential. 

Learn more about application traffic optimization with IBM NS1 Connect®