What is secondary DNS, and why is it important?

In DNS, nameservers are responsible for serving DNS records for a zone. How the DNS records populate into the nameservers differs based on the type of nameserver.

A primary server is a nameserver that manages a zone’s DNS records. This is where the zone file is maintained and where DNS records are added, removed, and modified. However, relying on one DNS server can be risky. What if that server goes down, or your DNS provider has an outage? If you run a storefront, then your customers would have to wait until your DNS server is back up to access your site. If your website were a brick and mortar store, this would be effectively like boarding up the door while customers are trying to get in.This type of outage can be very costly.

Now imagine you have another DNS server that has a replica of your DNS records. Wouldn’t it be great to have it as a back-up if your primary nameserver went down? Or better yet, what if both served your DNS records at all times— this could help decrease the latency of DNS requests, distribute the load between DNS servers, and add resiliency to your infrastructure! And that’s precisely what Secondary DNS nameservers were built for.

As businesses grow, they often scale their DNS infrastructure. We’re seeing more customers move away from two or three on-premise DNS servers to using a managed DNS provider to having multiple DNS vendors—all to increase redundancy against the possibility of a DDoS attack taking down one of their providers. Cloudflare has data centers in over 200 cities, all of which run our DNS software allowing our authoritative DNS customers to benefit from DNS lookups averaging around 11ms globally. So we decided to expand this functionality to customers who want to use more than one DNS provider, or for those that find it too complicated to move away from their on-premise DNS server.

#dns #analytics #secondary dns #data analytic