For many years already, the Unicast protocol has been outdated for the purpose of fast and secure DNS. It can’t manage with massive DDoS attacks, can’t handle load balancing in different locations, and it is quite slow for a global presence. But don’t get desperate, a new technology is there to help you out.
So what can you use to provide fast and reliable DNS?
Anycast DNS is here to step in. It is by far superior technology! It reduces latency, give extra security and minimize downtime.
But how exactly does it work?
Anycast is a routing method where one IP is used by many servers. The routers decide to which server to connect based on their routing tables. It will fast connect the user to the chosen server and reduce the latency.
There are two common schemes which are used to determine to which server, the user gets connected.
Network Layer Anycast. This is directing the user through the routers to the closest server. Here the important is the network path from the user to the server.
Application Layer Anycast. In this scheme, there are a lot more calculations: availability of the server, time to response, number of connections, etc. It depends on an external monitor, that provides the statistic of the network.
Advantages of Anycast DNS
Anycast is easy to configure. You have just one IP that is assigned to every server, no matter where they are in the world. In more traditional DNS solutions, you would have to configure for every location separately.
High availability. As we said before, the router will redirect the user to the closest server, but if the server is down, it will simply redirect to one of the rest. They all have a mirror image of the same DNS records, if one is down, the closest next will get the load. The users won’t even notice it.
Scaling. Anycast DNS is very easy to put in practice. Imagine you are getting too much load on a particular server, what do you do? You just deploy one more server in the area where you need it. It is easy to set it up, and you can do it very quickly. This is one of the common ways how we are expanding our Anycast network.
Our Anycast network consists of 21 Data Centers on six continents, and we also offer Anycast DDoS protected DNS servers and Anycast GeoDNS servers.
Think about your needs, and if you are not sure how to use, you can always contact our customer service for help.
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