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Google Cloud DNS

158 points| valhallarecords | 12 years ago |developers.google.com | reply

79 comments

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[+] tedivm|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] larrys|12 years ago|reply
"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

[+] t0mas88|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] gabemart|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] ctz|12 years ago|reply
"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.)

[+] andreaso|12 years ago|reply
Yeah, I'm getting that same premium experience.

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

[+] geekam|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] gtaylor|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jacquesm|12 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] tedivm|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] MBlume|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] jbeda|12 years ago|reply
We announced Cloud DNS at Cloud Platform Live on March 25th. It kind of got lost in the noise around the big price cuts.
[+] kapsel|12 years ago|reply
Not sure, but this one is funny:

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

[+] tedchs|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] MichaelTieso|12 years ago|reply
I was thinking the same thing. Has XKCD predicted the future again?
[+] jread|12 years ago|reply
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

[+] tfountain|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] gibybo|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] ithkuil|12 years ago|reply
if you need DNS based failover you want low TTLs , e.g Google.com A record is 100s
[+] rdl|12 years ago|reply
I wish either AWS Route 53 or Google Cloud DNS would support being a BIND protocol secondary :(
[+] scott_karana|12 years ago|reply
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...

[+] nodesocket|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] gtaylor|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] tomschlick|12 years ago|reply
Hopefully the lower cost from google causes aws to drop prices for this service as well.
[+] opendais|12 years ago|reply
Very nice...let us just hope they add Geo and/or Latency based routing. ;)
[+] TheSwordsman|12 years ago|reply
That and DNSSEC support. If they had DNSSEC support, I could see my organization moving to them.
[+] ksec|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] robertcope|12 years ago|reply
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

[+] gggggggg|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jonah|12 years ago|reply
Nice pricing.

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

[+] robertcope|12 years ago|reply
Take a look at DNS Made Easy.

robert