Cloud DNS : What it is, How it Works

Cloud DNS is a geographically distributed system with SPF, Glue and ENUM support and comprehensive GUI based support. Let us go deeper on Cloud DNS.
Unfortunately, this is the second time I have to re-write about Cloud DNS, as the regular readers are aware – when we got hacked 4-5 posts were lost. We recovered almost all or rewritten from Google’s Cache, unfortunately the post on Cloud DNS, before getting cached was deleted. In search result that Cloud DNS post is showing 404 error message as meta description! Its quite pathetic to see the fate of the post on Cloud DNS like interesting topic. We have do a .htaccess redirect to this post on Cloud DNS to solve it.

What is Cloud DNS

The most important thing is that, you need a basic idea about DNS itself. This article on Domain Name System (DNS) and Name Server (NS) can act as a good primer for the beginners. Another useful article on this DNS topic is Frequently Asked Question on Domains and DNS.

Cloud DNS is a geographically distributed DNS hosting service with centralized administration interface for easy management of the DNS zones. This is a fantastic infographic from Rackspace on Cloud DNS :

Features of Cloud DNS

Wikipedia has yet not scrapped any article on Cloud DNS. The basic thing is that, there are some providers who provide Cloud DNS to use to the end user. We will basically discuss the technology based on Rackspace as it is the most advanced and we will also use their technology for our Cloud infrastructure using Rackconnect with our own Datacenter. The Cloud DNS service from Rackspace is free, anyone can use it.

Cloud DNS Support for multiple record types (A, CNAME, NS, TXT, AAAA, DKIM, MX, SRV, and SPF). There might be difference in the technology underneath from one provider to another.

Cloud DNS has the biggest plus point of uptime. For complex server setup with lot of subdomains, using the API is the easiest way to manage the whole system. Propagation of Cloud DNS is very fast. In the infographic, you can see how the Admin and User is nicely isolated – it is ideal for servers with high payload. Quite obviously as the end result, the user gets a faster and responsive website.