The F5 DNS Cloud Service offers either a primary DNS service or a secondary DNS service to serve as a backup to your primary DNS services. DNS Cloud Service provides a number of benefits including global distribution, built-in DDoS Protection, and automatic scaling.
What can I do with the DNS Cloud Service?
The DNS Cloud Service allows users can create and manage their public DNS records via our web console or API. The DNS Cloud Service answers requests to translate specific domain names (e.g., www.example.com) to the IP address (e.g., 192.0.2.100, 2001:db8:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff).
You can use the DNS Cloud Service to create DNS records for a new domain with the Primary DNS service or transfer DNS records for an existing domain with the Secondary DNS service.
The DNS Cloud Service web console or API allows management of the following:
- Management of Primary or Secondary DNS zones and subscriptions
- Management of Primary DNS records
- Management of Primary Authoritative DNS servers for Secondary DNS zones
- Management of TSIG key used for zone transfers in Secondary DNS zones
What is DNS?
In the DNS protocol, there are primary authoritative DNS servers and secondary authoritative DNS servers. The primary DNS servers always hold the true configuration, and you make configuration changes only on the primary DNS servers. The secondary DNS servers then transfer the configurations from the primary servers. In the event that the primary DNS fails, a secondary DNS server continues providing DNS responses.
When creating a secondary DNS service, you must continue to use your current primary DNS servers and configure the DNS Cloud Service as a secondary DNS server. All configuration changes you make on the primary DNS server are replicated to the DNS Cloud Service through RFC-compliant zone transfers.
DNS Zone Transfers with Secondary DNS
You can specify which zones are transferred to the DNS Cloud Service acting as a secondary DNS. The DNS service uses Zone Transfer (AXFR) to retrieve DNS resource records from your primary DNS server. You can configure as many zones as needed. For each applicable zone, you must specify an existing TSIG key.
DNS Cloud Service as a secondary DNS service can process all of your DNS traffic if you configure your registrar or NS records to only point to the DNS Cloud Service, thus making your primary DNS server a “hidden primary” DNS server. F5 recommends this choice because you can hide your primary DNS and send all traffic to the DNS Cloud Service, which reduces the vulnerability of the primary DNS server to an attack, and improves DNS response times by leveraging our globally distributed DNS infrastructure and Anycast network.
Get Started with DNS Cloud Service
Requests for subscribing to F5 DNS Cloud Service have to be sent by email to f5cssales@f5.com
Once your account has been created, you can then decide which type of DNS service you want to use and then choose the appropriate article below: