A strong digital infrastructure becomes essential to any digital transformation strategy when businesses depend on cloud services. Nearly every tool that boosts productivity and cuts administrative costs requires fast, reliable connectivity. The Domain Name System (DNS) plays a key role by translating user-friendly domain names into the numeric IP addresses that machines understand.
DNS traffic consists of the queries and responses between a user’s device and a DNS server. Every time someone accesses a cloud resource through a web browser, their device sends a domain name request to the DNS server. If the server fails, the resource becomes unreachable. If it responds too slowly, users face frustrating delays.
Optimizing DNS with advanced traffic management settings helps organizations keep resources available and improve overall performance.
What Causes DNS Traffic Problems?
Several technical issues can impact domain name resolution. Some common issues that can impact DNS traffic include:
- Delayed response time that forces the DNS traffic managers to route traffic to slower servers
- Packet loss or jitter that deters traffic managers from using certain servers or reduces the amount of requests forwarded to them
- Insufficient server throughput of bandwidth that led to the traffic managers choosing higher-capacity alternatives
- Poor caching mechanisms that reduce resolution speeds
- Inability to monitor DNS in real-time, which decreases availability and increases response times
How Does DNS Traffic Management Work?
DNS traffic management, also known as DNS load balancing, optimizes DNS traffic distribution across several resources to improve performance and availability.
Traffic management typically includes the following:
- Web forwarding: redirecting HTTP or email traffic from one location to another
- Failover: redirecting traffic to a standby in case a server fails
- Load balancing: defining and managing the amount of traffic to various servers to prevent any one server from receiving more requests than it can handle
- Geolocation routing: optimizing traffic flows by forwarding DNS requests to the server geographically closest to the user making the request
- Caching: using a recursive DNS server’s cache memory to respond to requests faster
10 Ways to Optimize DNS with Advanced Traffic Management
Advanced traffic management enables the organization to improve performance, reliability, and security.
1. Implement Location-based Routing with EDNS Client Subnet (ECS)
Using GeoDNS improves response speeds by sending requests to the geographically closest DNS server. Since the requests and responses travel less distance, this reduces latency and improves load times. ECS obtains the geolocated responses and makes it possible to pass the requesting device IP address or subnet information to the appropriate DNS name server.
Learn more about GeoDNS.
2. Use a Global Anycast DNS Network for Failover Routing
Unlike geolocation-based routing, Anycast looks for the closest logical rather than physical distance. Anycast announces an IP address to multiple servers, enabling it to provide automatic failover when one server stops working. This process enables it to mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack risk since attackers can’t target all the potential servers at once.
Learn more about failover routing in UltraDNS.
3. Create an ASN Steering Policy
The Autonomous System Number (ASN) is a unique number identifying a set of IP networks and routers that an organization manages. An ASN steering policy directs DNS traffic and queries originating from a specific location to a specified destination. For example, an ASN steering can route requests to specific cloud platforms, like AWS or Azure, to direct traffic more precisely which reduces latency.
4. Use Weighted DNS Records for Load Balancing
Weighted routing associates multiple resources with a single domain or subdomain, then defines the amount of traffic allowed for each one. By defining how much traffic each resource gets, this process mitigates service disruptions from overwhelmed servers.
Want to learn more about load balancing? Check out, Load Balancing Matchup – Weighted Round Robin Vs. Round Robin.
5. Optimize Time-to-Live (TTL) to Reduce latency
The Time-to-Live (TTL) DNS record defines how long the server caches each record, which impacts the time it takes for record updates. Longer TTL reduces query frequency and can reduce latency as long as the cached records remain fresh. However, it almost means that propagating changes takes longer. Typically, TTLs between 300 and 86400 seconds are considered a best practice. However, mission critical applications that need to failover quickly could have TTLs lower than 300 seconds.
For a deeper dive, check out, Optimizing DNS Time –to Live (TTL) Settings for Performance and Reliability.
6. Implement DNSSEC to Improve Security
Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) mitigates risks from Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) and DNS hijacking attacks. DNSSEC validates DNS query results and uses digitally signed keys to verify authenticity. Some examples of keys that require signing and maintenance include:
- RRSIG: crypto signature of RR data
- DNSKEY (public keys): ZSK (signs zone data) and KSK (signs the zone)
- DS (Digital Signer): trust verification with a secure pointer to checksum of KSK
- NSEC: authentication for denial of existence (NXDOMAIN).
Check out our DNSSEC Implementation Guide: DNSSEC Setup and Best Practices for more details.
7. Use Split-view DNS
Also called split-brain and split-horizon DNS, this technique uses two separate zones and sets of DNS records to separate internal users on the internal network and external users from the public internet. For example, it means having separate DNS records for employee resources and customer-facing applications associated with the same domain. This process improves security by limiting the amount of sensitive infrastructure information available through the public-facing internet and enhances network performance by providing more efficient DNS resolution for internal users.
8. Monitor Performance and Analytics
To ensure DNS health, organizations should monitor various metrics around record queries and responses. Some typical reports might include:
- Host response: number of responses sent for hosts from a specific region for insights into where requests come from, zone names queries, host names queried, total number of responses for the query, answers returned for the query
- Usage summary: monthly usage and projected usage that includes domains counts, record type counts, and query statistics for the given account for insights
- Failover reports: number of failover and/or failback events within the reporting time frame
- Probe summary: insights into load balancing, monitoring, and failover
Vercara: Transforming Enterprise DNS Hosting
Vercara’s UltraDNS solution provides the global server resources that enterprise organizations need and the seamless integration required to fit into their current infrastructures. Our managed DNS handles up to 100 billion global authoritative DNS queries daily while maintaining near-zero response times to ensure optimal speed and reliability. With over 20 years of proven experience, we provide a 100% uptime guarantee with a global platform that is highly redundant with up to 47 nodes across 6 continents. Our trusted, authoritative networks use BGP and IP anycast routing schemes with co-located DNS nodes to provide near-zero latency response time and instant cache updates.
Organizations can work with our DNS experts who provide 24/7/3665 support with insights that maximize UltraDNS’s value to ensure the health and security of your DNS footprint, including help with zone migrations, DNS assessments, and product guidance.
