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Google Cloud DNS

developers.google.com

I'm wondering how Dyn is taking this. These guys have been working on DNS for years, and were probably one of the first "managed DNS" or "enterprise DNS" services. Over time though they've failed to really innovate, or even keep up with standard (you can't use any of their value add services like the global traffic manager if you also want to use DNSSEC, for instance). Despite this their prices have remained ridiculously high. Now that other players are moving into the market at literally multiple orders of magnitude cheaper it's tough to see why any of their customers would stay.

As a personal note, I would recommend the Edgecast DNS service over anything else. They have amazing customer support (something Google really lacks), and they've been in the CDN game for long enough to know that they are going to be around for awhile. They're also rather crazy about getting the best performance possible.

EdgeCast looks nice, but minimum of $50 a month.

http://www.edgecast.com/services/route-managed-dns/

We pay around $2 a month at Route53.

Route53 is not a bad option. If you're using EdgeCast CDN as well you'll probably get a discount on DNS (and I will point out that the EdgeCast CDN is faster, and more importantly, a hell of a lot cheaper than Cloudfront is).

For my use cases, CloudFront beat out EdgeCast quite a bit in price. (~20 TB / month commit with a request mix heavily biased towards NA and Europe).

@nieksand, feel free to get in touch with us at speedyrails.com (EdgeCast's resellers), I'm sure we can offer you a much better price than CloudFront's

Dnsmadeasy is also a good option for small to medium size requirements, in my opinion. I use it for my personal domains.

"I'm wondering how Dyn is taking this. "

I use dyn as well as run several dns servers in different places [1]

My reason for not using this is that it's being offered by google and the obvious fear that they will decide one day to stop offering this, supporting it, or improving it. As I am experiencing now with google voice for example,

[1] Since the mid 90's actually learning from this book:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565920101.do

I'm still with Dyn because their performance is ahead of Route53 and their health-check and failover functionalities are at this moment better than Edgecast.

However, we're using Edgecast for some things because the prices are much lower and they are actually capable of doing the same kind of health-check, failover and routing tricks at Dyn does. Their interface is just not fully ready yet so you have to email support to get changes and custom rules.

EDIT: Very quick non-representative test from 8 locations around the world shows Dyn responds faster than Google DNS in all of them. Note that these were datacenter connections so it could be very different for lower-bandwidth end-users.

Can anyone recommend a cheap DNS service that does geographic-based load distribution? I know that Route53 offers something like this, but AFAIK it's only designed for products hosted on Amazon's platforms.

I've heard that geographic-based DNS has something of a bad reputation, but I think it would be a very good fit for a side project I'm working on.

Check out http://nsone.net - newer service with a unique approach to geo/load balancing/failover using user defined rulesets (filter chains and data feeds).

You can do latency based load balancing to non-AWS endpoints with Route 53 -- the limitation is that you have to associate those endpoints with an AWS region. If your endpoints are not anywhere near an AWS region, you're stuck. Otherwise fine!

Rackspace Cloud DNS http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/dns/

DNSMadeEasy for $30/year

That's for their DNS Small Business Plan only, plus $55 per Domain per Month for Geo-DNS (http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/home/compare/)

"403. That’s an error.

Your client does not have permission to get URL /cloud-dns/ from this server. (Client IP address: [my-ipv6-addr])

We're sorry, but this service is not available in your country."

Google is denying access to services based on their broken ipv6 geolocation data (they think I am in Tehran, but I'm in London.)

Yeah, I'm getting that same premium experience.

Appear to also hit Google Apps as well as any AppeEngine hosted site.

Same problem for weeks now, apparently New York is in Iran

@dcc1: could you please email me at brian@<my username>.com? I work for Google Netops and would like to get some additional info from you so we can debug this.

Naïve question but what kind of organizations will benefit the most from this service? Or put it other way, the situations this service is needed for? Can anyone explain to me please?

If you are using Compute Engine or App Engine, this would give you a cheap, API-driven method for managing your DNS zones, without relying on an external service (though, there is nothing wrong with doing so).

It's also likely that Google will continue to improve this service over time, so who knows what the future will hold. In the case of Amazon's Route 53, they have some really neat features for pointing alias records at S3 buckets and Load Balancers.

> what kind of organizations will benefit the most from this service?

Google.

For instance, they could use you hosting your DNS with google as a signal, and it also gives them nice demographics information for sites that do not use GA.

Kind of surprised they don't make it free, compared to the value that would provide given the context of their other offerings they could nail all the competitors in this space while getting plenty of value out for themselves.

When you need a reliable & low-latency DNS for your services, you need Anycast DNS - not the one bundled with your GoDaddy's domain, see the differences between Anycast DNS & Unicast DNS: http://dyn.com/blog/unicast-vs-anycast-dns-nameserver-routin...

The same type of people who use CDNs. If you want great performance globally it helps to have primary DNS services near by, rather than having lookups cross the world.

I understand how CDNs are advantageous by having contents served from locations that are closer to origin of requests (typically browsers spread across the world or a country etc.,).

However, for DNS service to be of similar use does it mean application servers are going to be spread across geographically? For end customers it doesn't matter as they will always use the DNS configured for them by their ISP in most of the cases unless one is tech savvy and tries to use some other DNS such as Google etc.,?

Please help understand what am I missing here?

You're an Australian Internet User. You want to see hampsterdance.com 'cause fuck it, you like hamsters.

Your computer asks your ISP's DNS server for the record. If your ISP has it cached you're golden, but it turns out it probably isn't. So your ISP needs to go to ask the hampsterdance.com DNS server directly. If that server is in the United States then you're stuck waiting 133ms in one direction, 133ms back- you've now added a quarter of a second to that page loaded.

Using a DNS CDN means that 266ms ends up being 15ms (keep in mind that these guys also peer with local ISPs to make things even faster).

Thank you very much for this explanation. So for example I have a very basic website with CMS. I use a CDN just because I want to give the best possible experience to my users. I get about 50k users per month, a lot of them are new. Would adding a paid DNS or "DNS CDN" as you put it help my user experience enough to matter?

Honestly it depends on who your market is. If your users are mostly on the same continent as you it's probably not worth it, otherwise it could be.

On the other hand, if your site makes you money and you've got competition then every edge you can get is worth while.

thank you and thank you. ok that really makes sense. my site is b2b and although transactions do not occur on the website every ounce of frustration I can save matters. we also get a ton of users from US/AU/EU/AS so even with that it would make sense.

also DNS newb question here: is a query essentially an HTTP request?

Similar concept, different protocol. DNS is much more lightweight than HTTP, and also tends to run over UDP instead of TCP.

You're point is solid, but can you clear up some confusion for me? I'm not sure whether:

1) Round-trip times from Australia to the USA are truly as bad as 266ms

2) You're confusing ping's RTTs with one-way trips

3) You're assuming DNS has a syn/ack, which it doesn't.

EDIT: I suspect you realize there's no syn/ack in DNS based on your other comments... :)

I live on the east coast of the USA. Speedtest.net says my ping to my nearest server is 26ms, and to Sydney is 259ms. So it seems it really is that bad.

When we say "bad", let's remember that that's very close to the speed of light through fiber.

Thanks! That's depressing. :(

Was this announced by Google today, or is this on HN because of the XKCD? If the former, did Google push the announcement because of the XKCD?

We announced Cloud DNS at Cloud Platform Live on March 25th. It kind of got lost in the noise around the big price cuts.

Any chance of geographic and/or latency based views and edns-client-subnet support?

I'm not up on what the plans for that team are right now. I can say that it is an explicit goal to expose more and more of Google's infrastructure through cloud -- including how we route traffic globally.

The XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1361/

Not sure, but this one is funny:

dig +short -t txt google-public-dns-a.google.com

This was released on March 28th:

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/03/announcing-g...

Guess this is just on the front page because of XKCD about the other Google DNS product?

Google Cloud DNS is completely different than Google Public DNS. The former is an authoritative DNS service ("hosting") while Google Public DNS is a resolver.

I was thinking the same thing. Has XKCD predicted the future again?

It's a start - barebones authoritative DNS only - no monitoring/failover, load balancing, Geo, LBR, etc - provisioning via API only. Route 53 started out this way, and has since added many of these features and now has almost 7% Alexa 10k marketshare and rapidly growing.

I created a browser test that measures recursive DNS query times. You can test Google DNS query performance using this link: http://bit.ly/1nY4e60

Please don't post mystery meat URLs. The bit.ly link goes to: http://cloudharmony.com/speedtest/run?services_CDN=&serviceT...

Could you provide any more info on how this test works? Where are the tests performed from, or do they run client side? Does it query name servers directly, or if not, how does it avoid ISP-level DNS caching influencing the results?

Tests are from your connection using whatever resolver chain your ISP has in place. It uses a wildcard name record and an 8 byte json-p include. It alternates between downloading that file from the same origin using a cached DNS record (test run up includes 3 downloads to prime the resolvers with a cached hostname) and an uncached record (a new randomly generated hostname) and reports the difference in time between the two.

My results, from Toronto:

http://i.imgur.com/hOayTQH.png

Their example for a 'high traffic' site struck me by surprise. With all the caching that goes on with DNS queries, 1.2B in a month seems incredibly high. I wouldn't have even imagined google.com getting that many requests to the authoritative name servers. Can someone with a better idea of how traffic corresponds to DNS queries give me some perspective? How many DNS queries are the name servers for a typical Alex top 10 domain getting?

if you need DNS based failover you want low TTLs , e.g Google.com A record is 100s

Still though, aren't most consumers using their ISP's DNS servers, which will cache the same response for all of their customers in a region?

It all depends on how high ttl is, the number of queries increase exponentially as you decrease it, with ttl=0 you have no caching.

My company makes about 160qps which translates to about half billion per month, so it doesn't seem too unrealistic.

I wish either AWS Route 53 or Google Cloud DNS would support being a BIND protocol secondary :(

Route 53 developer here. That's on our roadmap, but in the mean time there is this; https://code.google.com/p/route53d/

Nice. Any idea if "internal" zones (private DNS for my VPC) will be supported by route53 at any point?

No kidding. I love the local speeds, and no doubt Google and Amazon do a good job of redundancy, but I'm sure as hell not going to put all my eggs in one basket. Not with DNS.

I had the same problem earlier this year, and if Rackspace or Route53 had AXFR support, I would have used them in a heartbeat...

axfr support might be useful even if you end up using them as primary:

1. migration

2. standard "config" API. You just keep up using your scripts to generate/update bind/tinydns configs.

DNS is so cheap, and Amazon Route53 has such an advantage with their latency based routing, health checks, and integrations with other AWS services. Honestly zones are $0.50 and $0.50 per million queries. You have to be pushing lots of DNS queries to have costs even exceed a tiny bill of $20 a month.

It is the definition of a lot of engineers hours and infrastructure costs for literally no profit for the company. However, it is a basic service every hosting provides has to offer to be competitive.

Given their other Cloud-oriented offerings (Compute Engine and App Engine), I'm not so sure they are doing this to make gobs of money. It's a hole in their service portfolio that they are filling. This can indirectly lead to people being more comfortable choosing Compute Engine, increasing adoption and earning Google more money as a whole.

AWS has Route 53 (which is probably not a huge money maker), Google needs to match them on this. I expect Google's offering to improve over time technically, just like Route 53 has. DNS is but one piece of each company's portfolio, but it's such a critical piece that it's expected to be there.

Hopefully the lower cost from google causes aws to drop prices for this service as well.

Unless your app operates at a truly massive scale with a very specific set of characteristics, this won't save you even a minuscule fraction on your total budget. Route 53 is dirt freaking cheap.

Really, how much would you save? We we even talking dollars a month?

Very nice...let us just hope they add Geo and/or Latency based routing. ;)

That and DNSSEC support. If they had DNSSEC support, I could see my organization moving to them.

You actually use DNSSEC in production?

Quite a few people do use DNSSEC in production.

An example of what can go wrong tho? http://blog.pagerduty.com/2013/12/outage-post-mortem-dec-11-...

Just a potential issue to keep in mind for people who do.

There is no point comparing this to AWS Route53. Purely in terms of speed Cloud DNS win Hands Down. I am not sure if the Cloud DNS is the same as their own DNS infrastructure, if so it is pretty damn fast.

The only other two DNS services I recommend is DNSMadeEasy and EdgeCast DNS. Both happens to one of the most affordable as well as fastest. ( Strange combination )

The only bad thing is EdgeCast got brought by Verizon. I am worry if anything bad will happen.

Really? In my very primitive tests, Route53 is considerably faster than Cloud DNS. And DNS Made Easy is faster than both of them.

Personally, DNS Made Easy is my favorite provider by far. Extremely fast, reliable, and priced very well. Plus, you don't have to deal with a sales guy unless you really want to.

I love it when Dyn or other big providers try and woo me. Thousands of dollars a month for DNS? Bahaha.

robert

They really need a free bracket. For example, anything under $1 a month.

From my perspective, I would prefer to pay $20 a year, than $1 a month.

I added a quick guide how to setup Cloud DNS for your domain.

https://www.zeitgeist.se/2014/05/01/google-cloud-dns-step-by...

I'd be interested in seeing a speed comparison with Cloudflare. Cloudflare's DNS is completely free and it's the fastest DNS service I'm aware of.

Another user posted a link to CloudHarmony for speed testing: http://cloudharmony.com/speedtest/run?services_CDN=&services...

http://wiki.opennicproject.org/ClosestT2Servers

Nice pricing.

I've been using UltraDNS for many years but this looks good too.

Take a look at DNS Made Easy.

robert

They are moving towards http://xkcd.com/1361/ :P

Is this free?

The pricing is right there on the sidebar (third link). https://developers.google.com/cloud-dns/pricing

No. $0.20 per hosted zone + $0.40 per million queries (first usage tier).

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