On September 26th, Microsoft announced its Azure DNS service has reached General Availability (GA) in all public Azure regions. The service was initially launched, in preview, at the May 2015 Ignite conference in Chicago.
Sean Wheeler, from the Azure Networking team at Microsoft, describes the service in the following way:
“Azure DNS allows customers to host their DNS domain in Azure, so they can manage their DNS records using the same credentials, billing and support contract as their other Azure services.”
Jonathan Tuliani, Azure Networking program manager at Microsoft has outlined some of the benefits of hosting and managing your DNS in Azure:
- Reliability – Azure DNS has the scale and redundancy built-in to ensure high availability for your domains. As a global service, Azure DNS is resilient to multiple Azure region failures and network partitioning for both its control plane and DNS serving plane.
- Performance – Our global network of name servers uses ‘anycast’ networking to ensure your DNS queries are always routed to the closest server for the fastest possible response.
- Ease of use – Your DNS zones and records in Azure DNS can easily be managed via the Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell, or cross-platform Azure CLI. Application integration is supported via our SDK or REST API.
- Security – Azure DNS benefits from the same authentication and authorization features as other Azure services, including the ability to configure multi-factor authentication and role-based access controls.
- Convenience – Hosting your DNS in Azure enables you to manage your Azure applications and their DNS records in one place, using a single set of credentials, with a single bill and with end-to-end support.
For customers who purchase their domain name from a third party, they can delegate their DNS to Azure DNS. Customers may want to do this in order to take advantage of Microsoft’s global reach and 99.99% SLA that they are providing with this service.
Customers can also reduce dependencies on local DNS servers by leveraging this service. Joe Stocker, from the Patriot Consulting Technology Group, explains:
“If all of your external DNS servers are in the same physical location, then Azure DNS provides an opportunity to migrate to a more resilient solution since Azure DNS is automatically load balanced across multiple regions.”
Microsoft has been working with Third-Party companies including Men & Mice to integrate Azure DNS with management software solutions. Using a solution like Men & Mice allows customers to manage their DNS, DHCP and IPAM configurations in a single tool that now includes support for Azure DNS.
In a recent Men & Mice blogpost, the company outlined why it was important to include Azure DNS support:
“Men & Mice has been working closely with the Azure DNS team during the Azure DNS Preview to implement full support for Azure DNS in the Men & Mice Suite. Men & Mice Suite customers can now enjoy the high availability, performance, low cost and convenience of hosting their domains in the cloud with Azure DNS, while maintaining full control of their DNS domains and IP address blocks via the powerful DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (DDI) tools provided by the Men & Mice Suite.”
Image Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-dns-general-availability/
Much like many of Microsoft’s other Azure services, Azure DNS will be billed in a usage-based model with no up-front or termination fees. Microsoft has based their billing upon the number of DNS zones that you want to host in Azure and the number of DNS queries that the service receives. For more details on billing, please refer to the following page.